Let’s consider the video. A bevy of young women in short things and tight tops, heels and big hair and tans and makeup. At first glance, it might be easy to place some blame on them. Don’t they have something better to do than bounce around in front of rich, creepy guys?
It was the nineties, pre #MeToo, and they were young and joyful. They were drinking and dancing on someone else’s dime, surrounded by their friends, aware of and unashamed by their attractiveness, their sexuality, their allure.
I used to be one of these women, not at that party, but at others, a few years earlier. The eighties. Me, over sixty now and a little stodgy. I never wear heels anymore, and I shop for blouses that cover my jiggling upper arms. I am in bed with my husband and a book most nights by nine.
But then. Then.
Then I loved to work on my tan and my body (I taught aerobics) and was eager to go out dancing and drinking. I was partial to cocaine and to casual sex because—well, they were fun. I had two part-time jobs and one full-time; I was going to school part-time to finish my degree, and fun—dancing, drinking, a little drugging, and the attention of men—gave balance to my life. All work—you know how it goes.
Judge me if you want. I don’t care. I turned out all right, I turned out fine. Tenured faculty. I pay my bills on time. I sat quietly and companionably beside my mother when she died, and my brother when he did. I am a responsible, respectable adult.
Let’s look at that video again. Look behind the bouncing women. See that man there? That man is the host of the party. A man so insecure that he has invited almost all women (dozens?) to his party, and just a few men. One of his male invitees we now know is a convicted pedophile, an accused sex trafficker. That man, Epstein, the convicted sex offender, looks small in this room of dancing, grand, beautiful female bodies. He looks like a boy, arms tucked around himself, watching, but not leering. Not leering like the host is. He looks uncomfortable. And maybe he is, afraid of real women, women who understand the power they have that allows them to enjoy this party, this fun, this release and rejoice. He prefers girls. Young ones.
When I was fourteen, I already had boobs and wore a bra and tight tops and hip-huggers and wanted to be a woman. I’d been to make-out parties where I’d fumbled inside a boy’s jeans and he’d fumbled inside mine. Kids’ stuff. No big deal. Back then my girlfriends and I hung out at a hotdog stand on our block, because we liked the men and almost-men who worked there. One of them, Gary, had a friend, Dick, who drove a bright yellow Charger and had a mustache. He was a little guy, Dick. Short and slight, like Epstein appears in the video. But Dick was very, very cute. And now I think back to the men I found attractive when I was a girl and a not-quite woman. Davy Jones, David Cassidy. Small. Narrow. Boyish. Perhaps their size made them familiar and thus attractive to me, like we were all not yet fully grown. But their being men already was equally attractive: if these were men, little as they were, perhaps I, then, was a woman. I so wanted to be a woman.
Dick and I flirted at the hotdog stand. He would call me some evenings at a time when talking on the phone was so important, when you could say things you might not say face-to-face—I like you. You’re cute—when you could listen to the breath of one another when the conversation slowed, when you held the receiver with such intensity your palm went wet and your ear hurt, when you would wait for the other to say goodbye first.
And once, when I was babysitting at my neighbors’, Dick came over. Have I said yet that Dick was twenty-two? That he had just graduated from college a month before? That he still lived at home, that he did not yet have an adult job?
I was thrilled to see him. Thrilled that he had chosen me, this man, this man who thought I was woman enough for him (perhaps it was because I was not a woman that he chose me, I understand that now, but it didn’t matter to me then.) I was thrilled (once the children were asleep in their beds) to stretch out on the couch of my neighbors’ dark living room with this small man and kiss and rub and grow warm and breathy. That was all we did, but I remember it still, the delight and excitement of an hour pressed together with a man on a couch.
I don’t remember the after of this. I don’t remember if Dick came around to the hotdog stand after, I don’t remember if he called me again. In those days my friends and I would talk about men (boys, really, because mostly, up until Dick, our experiences were with boys) only wanting one thing. Perhaps Dick only wanted one thing. Perhaps I did as well.
I don’t regret what happened. I wonder if he does. I do understand it differently now, though. I wonder if he does.
Now, decades later, when I see this small Epstein man surrounded by these glorious women, I can’t help but think of all those young girls he finagled to be with him. What they wanted, what they needed, what he promised (money, jobs, a home) was so much more than he ever intended to give.
It’s true, Dick,—by the way, I am aware of the accuracy of your name, your real name, the joke is not lost on me—it’s true that I wanted something I thought a small man could give me. I have always wanted things I know I should not have. I know, too, that I am not unique in this way. And yes, I complied when you led me into the dark living room, when we laid down on the couch. I complied; does that make me complicit? But here is what matters: I was not culpable. I was a girl (not really a woman); you were a man (no longer a boy). There is a reason there are laws against this type of thing. Some people need to be reminded of their responsibility.
I imagine Dick’s argument, as I imagine Epstein’s, as I imagine Brett Kavanaugh’s, as I imagine that of the host of the party on the video we all have seen now, that orange man in the white house, that Trump. “She wanted it, she wanted it, she wanted it. I am not responsible. I did what she wanted.”
Back to the video again. Watch these women dance, watch them toss their hair. Watch them gather around this man (not yet entirely unattractive) who pays for the party. And then see this moment, the one that disturbs me most of all. He grabs one of the women by the waist, tugs her to him, bites his bottom lip and slaps her bottom. A camera is on him. He knows this. Now look at his face as he does this, look at that expression. It is not like the carefree, joy-filled, good-times expression worn by these dancing women. It also is not a look that says, “I love beautiful women, I always have,” like he says all the time, a sorry excuse for his bad behavior. This is not a look of love, but of something else. Hostility. Anger. Predation. Desire to overcome, to conquer. I have been trying to think of an example, but nothing seems quite analogous.
The closest I come is this: I once saw a baby bunny in a garden, fluffy and bouncing in the grass. And then I saw a cat. I heard the cat growl, I saw him pounce. I saw him release the bunny, I saw the bunny try to hop away, its momentum fueling the cat’s predatory urges. Ears back, teeth bared, growl deeper now, the cat pounced again.
Let’s not blame the bunny. It isn’t the bunny’s fault.
Patricia Ann McNair writes fiction and nonfiction. The Temple of Air, stories, won Southern Illinois University Devil’s Kitchen Readers Award, Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year, and was a finalist for Society of Midland Authors Adult Fiction Award. And These Are The Good Times essays, was a Montaigne Medal finalist. McNair’s work has been published widely, including in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Good Men Project, Superstition Review, Solstice Lit Mag, Hypertext and other journals and magazines. She is a contributor to The Rumpus, and The Washington Independent Review of Books. She was named to Chicago’s NewCity Lit50 list, and to Guild Complex’s 30 Writers to Watch. Her work has been featured in creative writing textbooks, and she teaches graduate and undergraduate students at Columbia College Chicago where she directs the undergraduate creative writing programs. McNair is artistic director for Mining the Story, a writers’ retreat in Mineral Point, Wisconsin.