When I was 13 I received a text message that was not meant for me, from a boy my age. I do not know if it was about me (though anyone who has ever accidentally sent a message to the subject of that message will understand how it might have been), only that it was about a girl. I won’t reproduce its language here – though, more than 20 years later, I can still recall it almost word for word – but its substance was: I’d like to have sex with her, but I’d have to make her shut up first. It was, I think, the first time I learned that to be female rather than male was not just to be different – boys like football, girls like drawing – but to be unsafe. I wonder, now, if that was when my rage began.
I deleted the text immediately, and did not tell a soul. I still remember the hot sting in my cheeks, as the shame that should have been his became mine. Just as I didn’t tell anyone, five years later, when I was sexually assaulted at university; instead, I continued to live in the same building as the male perpetrator. Or – less serious, but still eroding – when I was spoken over in meetings, or not invited to meetings at all. Or when, just last week, a stranger whispered “bitch” under his breath as I walked past him. I was never explicitly taught so, but I had imbibed, somehow, that it was best not to make a fuss; that my female emotion would be read as weakness; that the worst sort of woman to be was a difficult woman.
I thought of that text message as I emerged from hours lost to the yawning black hole of the Epstein files. I found their contents horrifying and disgusting, of course, but I was not surprised by them. I learned long ago how a young teenage boy might talk about a girl when they believed they were unobserved; why wouldn’t the private exchanges of wealthy and powerful men, entitled and believing themselves untouchable, reveal something inordinately more degrading?
That anyone could be surprised by what the Epstein emails reveal seems, to me, further evidence that women and girls are still not listened to when they share their experiences of sexism and sexual violence – as is evident in the fact the Mandelson scandal was taken seriously only when it involved sensitive government information. Before this latest tranche of files, we did not know the precise and terrible details of who said what to whom, or who knew what and when. But the attitude towards women they displayed? That terrible impulse to see human beings as consumable and disposable? We’ve known about that for far too long.
Nearly a decade ago, the Harvey Weinstein revelations and the MeToo movement led women to talk openly about their experiences of misogyny and sexual violence; to share the shame they carried that rightly belonged to men. The backlash was swift. Today, nearly half of Britons believe that equality between the sexes has gone far enough, and 60 per cent of men believe that the pursuit of women’s equality has gone so far that men are discriminated against. MeToo got swept up in the rejection of censorious cancel culture and the excesses of liberalism. And some of this was right – a needed correction. Woke was out, and so too were quotas, DEI initiatives and women who, having spent too much of their lives shaping themselves around men’s fears and desires, didn’t feel much like caveating with “not all men”. (And no, I know, not all men, but also some men, and sometimes it is difficult to discern between the two before it is too late.)
It was no longer fashionable to talk about equality, and those women who continued to harp on about women’s rights or representation were considered worthy bores – not just by men, but by other women, too. Jordan Peterson regurgitated the talking points of the Seventies men’s rights movement, and young men were all too eager to drink the Kool-Aid. The entire Western world seemed to roll its eyes in unison: you’re in the room, aren’t you? What more do you want? The prickling shame I had once felt when confronted with obscenity was now reserved for the times I spoke out on behalf of my sex.
With time, I began to question the anger I felt at the injustices I still perceived around me. Was I too sensitive, too cautious, too quick to censure? Did I have any right to feel angry? After all, I hold a position of moderate power and influence in my workplace. I have a credit card, and could theoretically, in a different economy, own property. I do not have to have a baby if I do not wish to. If I were raped by my partner, it would be considered a crime. Only once has a man asked if he could choke me during sex – and at least he asked. Perhaps it had been illogical and unjustified to feel that, despite all the progress and victories of feminists before me, I had ever been thought of as secondary, or lesser, because of my sex.
Reading the Epstein files left me with the terrible feeling of having been right about something I never wanted to be right about: that some men hate some women, and that every man and every woman should be deeply disturbed by that and by the depraved ways in which it manifests. Sometimes misogyny is difficult to quantify or define; it is a feeling, a culture, an atmosphere, that seems to run between your fingers when you attempt to close your hand around it. And sometimes it is written down, in inexplicably typo-laden emails, in black and white. Either way, I will never again doubt that it exists.
[Further reading: Melania has nothing to tell us]
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This article appears in the 11 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Labour in free fall
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