Hi there
Thanks for bearing with me recently while I’ve relocated; sorry if the last few newsletters have been a bit concentrated on the house move. (Decluttering, winnowing and curating the things that surround us our daily lives is a big job. Toward the end I developed decision fatigue. But now I look around our new home and feel so happy with the furniture, art, books and objects we’ve chosen to bring with us for the next chapter.)
But in this newsletter, we’re branching out with my macro view of how the tectonic plates around attitudes towards women are changing. And I’m glad to say I think it’s for the better….
Also in this email (be sure to scroll down):
- We’re recruiting Queenagers for an exciting new mental health campaign
- Some upcoming events you won’t want to miss
- Links to the latest job openings on the Jobs Board
Now I am sure that many of you, like me, have been following the story of the tragic Virginia Giuffre (née Roberts), who tells a story of being a 17-year-old girl served up to Jeffrey Epstein and a coterie of other men as an after-dinner treat: like a human fruit basket, a chocolate bonbon or a particularly rare and succulent oyster.
Guiffre talks of Maxwell promising to help her train as a masseuse if she gave Jeffrey Epstein a “happy endings” massage in her “child’s panties”
What Giuffre’s story tell us
I’ve been dipping into the posthumously published memoir Nobody’s Girl Giuffre wrote before she took her own life last year. It’s one of the saddest tomes ever, detailing sexual abuse by her father and his friend when she was a kid, followed by meeting Ghislaine Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago.
She tells of Maxwell promising to help her train as a masseuse if she just gave Jeffrey Epstein a “happy endings” massage in her “child’s panties” (she was 16). And she writes how this led to years as a “sex slave” to Epstein’s motley roster of powerful and important men.
In a real example of the banality of evil, Guiffre’s accounts of abuse are interspersed with weirdly familial scenes like “movie nights” with Maxwell and Epstein and beach walks where they collected driftwood. She talks about being a prisoner in an uber luxe contemporary Florida version of Bluebeard’s Castle, replete with weird sexualised photographs and endless penis and vagina statues. This was perversion hiding in plain sight.
Some of the most chilling passages are her accounts of her Epstein-facilitated-trysts with a man she calls the “minister”: a powerful global politician who beat her so viciously she thought she might die. When she told Epstein how violent the man had been, he said coldly: “You’ll get that sometimes.” Horrifying.
How Epstein relates to the grooming gangs
When I was editor at The Saturday Times, we ran some of the journalist Andrew Norfolk’s first accounts of the Asian grooming gangs in Rotherham and the north of England. Reading Guiffre’s story is akin to reading the accounts of the ordeals of the girls involved in the British child-grooming scandals.
There are definite echoes in these stories: Young girls from the wrong side of the tracks entrapped and monstrously sexually abused by men while authorities turned a blind eye.
In Rotherham, police and social services viewed the girls – some only 13 and in “care” – “not as victims but as troublesome young people, out of control and willing participants,” said Alan Billings, South Yorkshire’s police and crime commissioner, in 2015. “We saw it as child prostitution rather than child abuse and that’s why it all went wrong.”
These adults and enforcers of the law seemed to have forgotten that it’s rape to have sex with a child under the age of 16; consent between an adult man and a child is impossible.
The grooming gangs were trafficking children around the UK for sex in a similar way that Epstein allegedly arranged for his “Lolita Express” private plane to fly girls to his Caribbean Island so they could be made to have sex with his guests. A criminal complaint from the attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands described it as “the perfect hideaway and haven for trafficking young women and underage girls for sexual servitude, child abuse and sexual assault”. A brutal and apt description.
So how can any of this be good news?
A surprising source of hope
Of course what has happened to these girls and young women is sickening and heartbreaking. One of the most chilling things Andrew said to Emily Maitlis was that Virigina Guiffre reminded him of his own daughters, who were only a few years younger.
Did he not join the dots? Did he remember that Guiffre too was someone’s daughter? Nope. He was too entitled.
(That phrase in Andrew’s email to Epstein, then a convicted paedophile – “We’ll play some more soon” – makes my skin crawl.)
But the reason I think there’s a positive in all this is because of the global revulsion, not just with Epstein and his recruitment of young girls but also with the British grooming scandal. These monstrous crimes committed against these young women is now front page news…and that IS a step forward.
Remembering the bad old days
It’s a story as old as patriarchy: Women as objects for men’s pleasure, wives as a possession of their husband, no different from a cow. (Historically, rape laws were property crimes, about one man violating another man’s possession, decreasing its value. The victim was not the woman but the father or husband.) Incredibly, rape within marriage was legal until 1991.
Think about harems, standard for powerful male rulers for centuries; or the Romans and their “dancing girls” brought in after dinner to entertain the chaps. I’ve been watching Harlots – again the story of women being bought as flesh for male entertainment.
And remember when we were growing up: In the 1970s, it was normal for cars to be sold with sexy young women draped over the bonnet. When I was a pupil at a prestigious private school in the 1980s, we gossiped about Bill Wyman (then in his 60s) having a 14-year-old girlfriend.
The tired May-December trope
It wasn’t so long ago in the culture that it was almost expected for rich powerful older men to be paired up with very young women. Think about something as mainstream as Larry Grayson’s Generation Game (ancient male presenter, young dolly bird), the beginning of Strictly Come Dancing when an octogenarian Bruce Forsyth was teamed with a young blonde Tess Daly. Or James Bond, for whom it was entirely normal to have sex with a woman he’d just met in a shower. I was watching this scene with a friend’s 16-year-old son the other day. He exclaimed, “Isn’t that assault?” Exactly!
That is the point.
Post #Metoo, post Harvey Weinstein and thanks to such campaigns as Everyday Sexism and Everyone’s Invited, we no longer turn a blind eye to the sexual objectification and exploitation of women.
In my new office, one of the books on my shelf is called Women Don’t Owe You Pretty, which the author (age 21 when it was published) said was to “hopefully poke some holes in [the] façade” that women “need men, their validation and the products they sell to us to make us look ‘better’”. At my old house, my daughter as a teen wrote graffiti on her bedroom wall that read: “Women do not exist to satisfy the male gaze”.
Now when we hear of powerful men using young women like playthings, sex dolls, something else for them to consume like a piece of fruit plucked from the basket or an extra oyster, we don’t think that is ok. I think that is new and that it’s progress.
It’s easy to get depressed about it
The stories are grim. It’s so easy to feel depressed and disheartened when we hear or read stories about these inhumanities.
But the fact that Virginia Guiffre’s book has been published, that Epstein was put in prison, that – and I know it is a very controversial issue right now – some perpetrators in the grooming gangs are finally being punished and the system that colluded with them is being interrogated. It’s all evidence of a welcome shift in how we think about women, our bodies and our power. The very outrage that surrounds them now, the clamour for justice for the young female victims, is a major shift.
Young people are rebelling too
Younger women think it’s weird and perverse for older men to ogle or put the moves on them. They aren’t flattered or interested.
To me it’s particularly striking that the article isn’t written by an older feminist like me (I’ve been banging on about the dangers of internet pornography for 15 years) but by one of the young men who has grown up amid the glut of extreme sexual material available at the click of a mouse or a swipe on a screen. I can’t tell you how welcome it was to read such a stinging attack from a young man on this kind of empty, sad sexuality. (Big thanks to Helen Lewis’s Substack The Blue Stocking for sharing this.)
Our generation remembers the ‘olden days’
It’s not all roses of course. The Epstein Files, which contain all sorts of sordid details of antics of powerful men, are still sealed in America…and the girls who suffered at the hands of the grooming gangs are still concerned that the latest enquiry won’t bring them justice – prompting 4 of them to resign from it last week.
If we zoom out, we can see how much our generation has seen things change over a few decades. For example, in my first job as a 18-year-old Champagne waitress in Soho, I remember serving a group of men and one of them pinched my arse. I told him to ‘Fuxk off’ – and was promptly sacked for being rude to customers!
That approach has now changed. The kind of man who pinched my bottom then could now be charged with assault. Plenty of bar managers (perhaps women themselves or men who are equally disgusted at such behaviour) would throw out a client like that.
I feel a glimmer of hope that the furore around poor Virgina Guiffre and the grooming gangs point to a new era, a shift in fundamental attitudes – that young women, especially vulnerable ones, aren’t there to be used and disposed of. That they are speaking up and speaking out. It’s a rare bright spot in these tales of horror and abuse.
My advice for Prince Andrew
I have one last thought for Prince Andrew. If he really wants to make amends, if he really now comprehends the callousness and horror of what the girls and prosecutors say happened in Epstein’s plush prison, then I have a solution. (Note: Andrew, who paid Guiffre £12 million to settle a civil action, denies her allegations.)
Andrew could come clean to American prosecutors about what he knows. He could give evidence against the other powerful men he met and “played with” at Epstein’s houses. That would be Princely: An action by a member of a royal family that we could truly be proud of.
Andrew could redeem himself and land a blow for women everywhere (and all the good men who abhor the behaviour of the men who use and abuse these girls and women).
Nothing less will wash.
All the best,
Eleanor
Open to all: Our NOON Book Club is on October 28th – we’re talking about my book Much More to Come, now out in paperback. All are welcome!
We have a NOON London Circle on November 4th plus others around the country that are free to members – see them all the Events page. Our next Online Circle will take place in November.
👇 Take part in a positive mental health campaign👇
Has therapy helped you in midlife?
We’re looking for 10 Queenagers to be part of a major national mental health campaign to encourage midlife women to get the therapeutic help they need in order to embrace the magnificence and mayhem of midlife.
If you’ve been helped by therapy for divorce, bereavement, redundancy, elderly parents, coping with a Gen Z with a mental illness, menopause – you name it – get in touch now to be part of this worthwhile campaign. Plus, you’ll be photographed by world-famous photographer Rankin.
Email hello@noon.org.uk 3 to 4 paragraphs with your experience of midlife therapy
- Explain how it helped you, why others could benefit and why you’d like to do the campaign
- Attach a recent photo
- Confirm that you’ll be available to come to London on either November 10th or 13th 2025
- Note: Travel expenses to London will be reimbursed
Telling your story could inspire another Queenagers to get help and improve their lives!
