Fintan O’Toole is on fire:

Epstein’s cult demanded human sacrifice, preferably that of young virgins. (“He likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Donald Trump smirked in 2002.) The scale of the demand was vast: the US department of justice estimated that Epstein sexually abused more than a thousand girls.

Those girls were, in this system, fungible assets, their value interchangeable with that of the dollar. They functioned as currency in an elite gift economy, passed around as tokens of status – to be granted the right to use their bodies was to be in with an ultimate in-crowd, a charmed circle of mutual enrichment and reciprocal advancement.

Sexual predation was not a mere perk of membership. It clearly functioned as a rite of passage. Either directly through participation in the abuse of these girls, or indirectly through choosing to ignore what we might call ambient rape – the muzak of misogyny that played all the time in every room of Epstein’s mansions – collusion was established and maintained. Guilt was shared – but so was the sadistic pleasure of male domination. “Pain,” writes one of Epstein’s anonymised scientific correspondents, “is interesting.”

The Epstein files (and we should remember that millions of documents are still being withheld, presumably to protect the guilty) are the underground waste disposal system of a very open and massive construct: the backlash against feminism. These are secret histories of a counter-revolution. Epstein and all those within his astonishingly expansive sphere of influence – bankers, speculators, political players, but also scientists, intellectuals and artists – are culture warriors. The war is being waged on women.

And some of the warriors are men we (women) thought of as friends or allies or both.

At one level, this is all about unrestrained power. But at another it is very much about restraint: on women’s right to object to sexual predation. “Just as the Me Too movement has gone too far so has Botox” (Soon-Yi Previn to Epstein). “Bugs me a little the metoo (sic) entitlement What does an actress think if she goes to a producer hotel at 2am?” (Name of sender blanked out). “MeToo. MeNotTrue” (physicist Lawrence Krauss). “Good news btw is that woman on conciliation committee seems like a sweetie.. she is old.. not some young metoo bitch” (Krauss to Epstein on a hearing into his behaviour at Arizona State University). “The hysteria that has developed about abuse of women” (Noam Chomsky to Epstein). And so on.

Ah yes. We know what “young metoo bitches” Krauss had in mind. It’s so bitchy of women to object to sexual abuse and generalized subordination and contempt.

Violent misogyny never went away, of course – it is literally at home in every society. Yet it needs to be validated as an elite practice, a way of life not just for unkempt thugs but for the rich and famous. It needs its own cloak of glamour.

What the Epstein files show is that there is no jarring contradiction between, on the one side, high-flown discourse (pretentious discussions on the nature of consciousness), ostentatious philanthropy, private jets, private islands, gorgeous mansions – and on the other side, the cannibalistic consumption of young female lives.

The grammar of wealth meets the vocabulary of the brothel. One indelible image from the files is a photograph of a wall-sized mirror from one of Epstein’s houses on which is imprinted in big capital letters: “F— ME LIKE THE WHORE I AM.”

It’s as Germaine Greer said decades ago – “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.”