Jeffrey Epstein has risen from the dead. Whether by suicide or skullduggery, he died in his jail cell 7 years ago during the first Trump administration. He remains a symbol of male misogyny and pedophilia, which is why Donald Trump would like folks to forget all about it. I hesitate to add any commentary to what looks like a media pile-on, but there’s already a juicy pile of pulp non-fiction that is, unfortunately, a true story of pervy men preying on pubescent girls.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-will-sommer.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8ge16d2y3o
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/15/trump-epstein-files-maga
All these accounts are both illuminating and horrifying and confirm that Epstein is not the only pervy male wanting (or even having) sex with underage girls. But that’s not where PLBW will be going with all of this.
Instead, I’d like to note the irony (and agony) of seeing so many young men being influenced to behave much like Epstein, and to see Trump’s posturing as “manly,” “aggressive,” “dominant,” and “in control.”
Commentators have called this the “manosphere,” and supposedly a great divide opened up in the 2024 elections, with young men seeing Trump as a positive personification of maleness, and with young women being unimpressed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/opinion/trump-white-young-men.html
Data from the 2024 election cycle shows that Gen Z men (ages 18–29) were significantly more likely to support Trump than women in the same age group, with some polls indicating young men were up to 13 percentage points more likely to favor him. Nearly half of young men surveyed report that being perceived as masculine is important to them, and for some, Trump’s style embodies the kind of assertive manhood they admire or feel is necessary in today’s culture. Studies connecting psychological concepts like “precarious manhood” to politics found that young men who feel their masculinity is threatened are more likely to support aggressive leaders like Trump, seeing this as a way to reaffirm their own status as “real men.”
All you have to do is be a “star” or very “rich” to get what you want, guys! As Trump boasted to Billy Bush in 2005, in the now infamous Hollywood Access tape that surfaced before the 2016 election: “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women]—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Okay, so I think it’s fairly safe to say that neither Epstein (nor Trump, nor men like them) have a real “love” for women. Epstein used them, even under-age women, for his own pleasure, with terrible consequences for those women. Even one visit to Epstein’s mansion in Palm Beach was enough to ruin the lives of these many young women, now believed to number in the hundreds.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/19/opinion/interesting-times-julie-k-brown-epstein.html
If you’re surprised that Epstein and Trump were friends for 15 years you are, as my dad would say, “wet behind the ears.” Never mind that Trump dismissed him on July 8th as a “creep” and sounded so very irritated that “anyone was still talking about him.” As Thom Hartmann commented on July 17, 2025:
“Donald Trump is an adjudicated rapist, according to the judge in his case. A New York jury found him liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll in a civil case, and he’s remained unapologetic. Then he moved straight to pardoning other men in his orbit, even convicted ones like Roger Stone and a rapper with a history of alleged sexual assault. And now he’s telling us to stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein. . . He has also pardoned multiple anti-abortion criminals as well as Ross Ulrich, who ran the world’s most notorious market for illicit drugs (that some allege could also have been used for human trafficking). The Trump administration apparently helped free Andrew and Tristan Tate, rightwing influencers accused of rape in Romania, from prison in that country so they could return to America to help promote the GOP to their young male followers.”
Hartmann goes on:
“Rape culture isn’t just at the top; it’s everywhere, especially in the digital spaces young men inhabit. Pornography has become the de facto sex education for millions of boys. A ten‑year‑old with a smartphone has unfettered access to violent, misogynistic content that normalizes coercion and degradation.”
Misogyny? It starts early. In seventh grade, a boy came up to me at Edison Jr. High School in Westfield, N.J. We’d all heard of the Four H Club, a youth development organization that originated in the United States in the early 1900s. Four H aimed to promote positive youth development through hands-on educational experiences. The name “4-H” stands for Head, Heart, Hands, and Health, reflecting the four values that members work on through their activities:
- Head: clearer thinking
- Heart: greater loyalty
- Hands: larger service
- Health: better living
The enduring goal of the 4-H Club is to help youth develop life skills and become proactive, responsible citizens in their communities and the wider world.
So back in 1960 a seventh-grade boy came up to me and said, “Did you know, I’m a member of the Four F club?” What’s that, I asked. “Find ‘em, feel ‘em, fuck ‘em, forget ‘em.” He smiled, proud of himself. Then he walked away. But that attitude was common.
In the 1950s, young men were pretty much oriented toward seeing “the opposite sex” as something to be “had.” Crying (or emoting in general) was frowned upon; if you were rough and tough maybe a “football hero,” you could get a “beautiful gal.” And, like a football player, you could “score” if you were handsome and athletic –– a manly young man. Or, like a baseball player, could you “get to first base” with a girl (kissing, e.g.).
The concept of “scoring” and “bases” was part of the teenage social vocabulary:
- First base: Typically referred to kissing, including French kissing or “making out.”
- Second base: Groping or touching above the waist, especially the breasts.
- Third base: Touching below the waist or, in some interpretations, oral sex.
- Home run (scoring): Sexual intercourse.
For a memoir of what it was like to be dating in those days, see Dan Greenburg’s Scoring.
We weren’t drenched in pornography as some 12-year-olds are these days, but we didn’t need to be to see “girls” as objects of adoration or lust, rather than as people with personas, or interesting in their own right. “She has a great personality” was a kind of death sentence, pronounced by a friend who thought we might date someone who did not “live up to” the current feminine standards of beauty.
Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield (“the Blonde Bombshell”) were sold by a capitalist economy to impressionable young men as “dumb blondes,” sexy and desirable exactly because they would bend to a man’s will. To fit Hollywood’s sales machine, each of them had to hide their own intelligence.
Much has been written about the “lost boys” of our times, left behind by feminism, the hollowing out of traditional masculine jobs in the U.S. We are seeing escalating rates of suicide, overdose, and mental health symptoms, isolation and family instability, and real confusion about gender roles and what it means to be a “man” in the U.S.A. today. No question about it: the combination of social, economic, and cultural pressures—and the lack of effective mental health support—has created a situation where many young men in the U.S. are facing significant psychological challenges by nearly every available metric.
But as Thom Hartmann points out, the Democratic Party ––wondering how it “lost” the younger men to Trump in 2024 –– cannot and must not join forces with the “manosphere” as it is currently being portrayed. And civil society can do its part, as well.
“What we need instead is a redefinition of masculinity: strength defined by compassion, power defined by service, leadership defined by respect. . . .True masculinity uplifts. It nurtures. It protects without demeaning. It leads with humility. It affirms the full humanity of women.”
“That’s the kind of man worth celebrating and inviting young men to be. Not the guy who calls himself a “legion” builder or hustles violent porn on the internet and brags of his conquests on YouTube, or thinks women exclusively belong at home to “raise the babies.”
“A woman’s place is in the home” is an idea increasingly promoted by, among others, Vice President J.D. Vance. The T. Admin has even offered a paltry bonus for “trad wives” who want to make America great again by staying home with their children. To be sure, the U.S. (and many other nations) will want to increase birth rates if we are to replace ourselves. In most developed countries, including the US, the total fertility rate (TFR) is well below the “replacement” level of 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a stable population without immigration.
TFR is especially important if “America” is to remain white and Christian, halting the flow of “brown skinned” and/or non-Christian immigrants.
The dust may not soon settle on Trump telling his MAGA base that he will not, after all, be the savior to expose the deep state, the elite pedophilia that QAnon and other Magaverse personalities (including Trump) have claimed are running the world, running a pedophile ring, and all the while ruining the lives of ordinary Americans. Pizzagate was entirely made up by QAnon. (See a previous post on PLBW, Hating Hilary and the Child-Eating Democrats)
But unlike Pizzagate, Jeffrey Epstein was real, and his crimes were against children, though he was not a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat aligned with Hilary Clinton and John Podesta, trafficking babies and/or drinking their blood to stay young. Still, he was the kind of disgusting villain that conservative minded folks feel utter revulsion for, and with good reason. Trump’s evident friendship with Epstein makes him seem like he is part of the very elite that he was supposed to bring down –– revealing the depraved depth of democrats and elitists running the world and ruining it –– so that we could Make America Great Again. No other promise to his supporters could be any more important.
But it all raises a lot of difficult questions for all of us as we watch this unfold, knowing that “control” and “dominance” look like attractive traits to many young men in the U.S. today. To effectively repudiate the Jeffrey Epstein-Donald Trump mindset of misogyny and exploitation, we should all challenge men to become allies in a fight for justice, equality, and democracy. In Hartmann’s words, redefining masculinity isn’t a side project: it’s central to reclaiming our national soul. And it’s vital to praise men who speak the truth, keep their promises to family, friends, and communities, and see God’s word as requiring that men honor women, not exploit them.
The “dominant” and “rich” personas of Epstein and Trump did lead to illegal behaviors; what is legal but wrong is the “manosphere mantra” that, for the United States to be “great” again, young men must be molded into a male stereotype of aggressive and self-seeking behavior, spreading their seminal seed far and wide. Elon Musk has been showing us just how grotesque that is.
https://www.discourseblog.com/p/elon-musks-legion-of-offspring-is
It’s high time that men of all ages in the U.S. put the misogynistic mantra of the “Four F Club” far behind us.