Are the Epstein Files Making Sexual Entitlement Uncool?

Actually I don’t think this is a matter of comparing apples to rotten bananas because, from my time as an advocate for DV survivors, I’m convinced that domestic violence and coercive control are, underneath all the rationalizations and spin, largely about the enforcement of one-sided monogamy which itself is a factor in protracted r@pe.

In other words, I think there’s a strong case to be made that garden variety cheaters are a variety of r@pist so the analogy is really between rotten apples and possibly more rotten apples.

But because domestic abusers tend to mask their motives the better to cause learned helplessness in victims (instrumental conditioning to cause learned helplessness only works if animal subjects subjected to the shock box don’t know why they’re being shocked) it’s kind of a long argument to make the case that, even in situations where cheaters seem to have lost all interest in their primary partners, it’s still about sexual control of the partner.

Like some scientist whose name I forget put it, “Facts tend to cluster around a good theory” and I know from experience that anyone who does a deep dive into the psychology and tactics used by typical domestic abusers will discover that the facts all line up elegantly with the idea that domestic abuse is protracted rape and cheating is part and parcel with domestic abuse.

Of course in an age in which science has replaced the church in terms of its influential power and in which scientific theory literally often grounds laws and policies, not just public opinion, we would need the large scale studies to prove the correlation between DV and cheating, cheating and pedophilia, cheating and rape and cheating and domestic murder.

The idea that virtually all abusers are sexually controlling and virtually all abusers also cheat are things that front lines advocates have known for a long time with or without the science. But the more life and death an issue is, the more controversial it is and the more blowback it’s going to draw, the more you need science to make the case these days. Though precisely because science is the new power base, perpetrators of every stripe would prefer to reserve use of it to control the narrative so it’s going to be like pulling teeth to get studies like this funded.

To me that’s one glaring way in which the Epstein file dump is relevant to “cheating”: because the reason the studies don’t exist yet correlating cheating with abuse and sexual abuse may be that, as it turns out, most of the world’s biggest grant funders are either abusers themselves or financially and personally enmeshed with pervs.

Not that victims necessarily need science to make equivocations and say that being betrayed feels like r@pe. One easy way to equivocate cheating to r@pe without really requiring hard data to back it up is that, in the case that cheaters are continuing to have sex with primary partners who might otherwise refuse if they knew what cheaters were up to, this can logically fall under the heading of “r@pe by deception” which, whether or not it’s legislatable in all forms, is a topic of continued serious debate by ethicists and legal authorities.

But I think the equivocation goes beyond r@pe by deception and, to the degree that a correlation between abuse, r@pe and cheating could potentially impact divorce law and custody not to mention criminal law, science is required to clarify. In the meantime, evidence backing up the “hypothesis” that cheating equates to r@pe and battery and also higher rates of child sexual abuse can be cobbled together piecemeal style through tangentially related research.

There’s at least enough evidence to argue that more research is needed. Like the fact that, from the time we were swinging from trees, coercive control was employed to ensure one-sided sexual compliance from the victim not just “now” but “down the line” at whatever later date the perpetrator wished and just in case they did. (at 2:33: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hj5QAIjDulQ).

Wrangham is explicitly claiming that coercive control is in service to protracted rape as well as other enforced services among humans as it has always been with chimps and, presumably, with our ape ancestors. But because our closest ape cousins (and therefore presumably our ape ancestors) don’t practice monogamy and both genders tend to be sexually unselective, it could seem like a stretch to argue that human coercive control is motivated by one-sided enforcement of monogamy.

How can something be about monogamy if the tactic preceded monogamy in a species’ evolution? Easily in the sense of dominant chimp males often using coercion or violence to prevent a particular sexual target from mating with other males and vice-versa, at least temporarily. All this says is that, if humans evolved to be more monogamous than chimps or at least to prefer that mates be monogamous, the motive to prevent “straying” in partners might be that much more intense. Wrangham has even theorized that this motive is so powerful in humans that it fueled the very difficult leap to language to the extent that gossip can be used to keep sexual tabs on mates.

Then there’s the fact that about 66% of child sexual offenders were married for at least parts of their offending careers. Though the offense of child rape is obviously far darker than cheating, the point is that they seem to often go hand in hand since, as minimizing as it sounds, child rape by a partnered rapist is technically extra-dyadic sex. Furthermore, rape by deception (or worse) is built in since most normal people would refuse to have sex with a partner they knew was a violent pedophile. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277539516000443

Another piecemeal bit of evidence that cheating and abuse go hand in hand is the fact that battered women have significantly higher rates of infection with STIs and HIV. Even if researchers try to downplay the factor of perpetrators having multiple partners and instead awkwardly narrow the focus on how abuse robs women of the agency to use condoms in marriage, it’s a bit of a no-brainer that infidelity– overwhelmingly by perpetrators– is a driving factor in infections: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3856434/#:~:text=This%20analysis%20adds%20to%20the%20growing%20body,its%20impact%20on%20risk%20for%20STI%20acquisition.

Then there’s the fact that at least one small scale study found a direct correlation between DV and adultery, though again the focus is awkwardly narrow, in this case assuming abuse only involves physical assault. Also perpetrators– who, for the purposes of the study, are known to be habitual liars since, as cheaters, they were known to be at least initially concealing affairs– are taken at their word that their main motive for violence is to prevent wives from disrupting men’s freedom to cheat. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3583221/

But if authors of the above study had asked wives certain questions, they might have discovered the many ways in which cheating male study subjects controlled their wives social behavior and independence or ways these men responded to perceptions or threats of being cuckolded.

But, in their study design, authors were pretty clear about the bias that would prevent them from asking victimized study subjects more pointed questions regarding histories of coercive control, social isolation, marital rape, etc. Authors state in the abstract that that they set out to prove that the traditional assumption that male sexual jealousy drives domestic violence is wrong and that it may actually be partly (or even mostly?) driven by female jealousy.

All the same, the real takeaway of the latter study is the correlation because it’s there to be seen if anyone has the inclination or guts to look. But that’s another takeaway from the Epstein scandal: look what happens to people when what they know and can prove threatens to expose the sexual basements of powerful people to scrutiny. Anyway, none of us should hold our breath waiting for these studies to be performed, at least not in the current political climate. But I think we all know what they’d prove.