Pretty Babies: Exploring Epstein & The Beauty Industry

The recent release of additional Epstein documents has reignited public discussion about the role of predatory elite networks of men in shaping not only systems of exploitation, but also the commercial and aesthetic industries that structured many of our formative experiences. In response, many women have begun reflecting on the unsettling reality that elements of our self-image were shaped within cultural environments have been dictated by sexual predators and pedophiles. And I am here to tell you… it’s more than you think.

One Instagram creator Ileana Justine said in a reel “Right now millennial women are forced to reckon with the fact that our experience with girlhood was directly tied to the most powerful sexual predators. Millennial women grew up in the shadow of Jeffrey Epstein. We didn’t know it at the time but he and his pedophile friends had a finger on all of our decisions... It’s not just that the people we held up as heroes; princes, presidents, hollywood stars—were in fact villains. It’s that the power they wielded over society impacted all of us. The perverted nature of these men infiltrated every aspect of our lives. ” And sister, I’m going to hold your hand when I say this, it’s not just millennials, and it’s not just Epstein. Pedophiles been the dictators of culture for some time now. This is not a millennial experience tied to a specific era, or even a specific set of people. Everyone’s girlhood is directly tied to sexual predators. The legacy of girlhood as we know it is rooted in pedophilia. Sexual predators have long shaped the cultural construction of contemporary girlhood.

When I have suggested in conversation that contemporary beauty standards are fostered within a culture shaped by these dynamics, I have often been met with confusion, hostility, or dismissiveness—particularly from men. Yet increased attention to Epstein and his circle has prompted wider dialogue that forces this conversation to the forefront cultural dialogue. American billionaire businessman Les Wexner of Victoria’s Secret was a close associate of Epstein and maintained a long personal relationship with him. Epstein often utilized his proximity to Wexner in order to lure girls into his vicinity. Multiple fashion industry professionals appear in the associated records, including French model scout Jean-Luc Brunel. Donald Trump, another associate of Epstein, owned the Miss Universe Organization—which includes Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA—from 1996 to 2015.

Ileana Justine continues:

“Mall culture of the early aughts was owned by men associated with Epstein. Bath and Body Works, Limited Too, Abercrombie and Fitch, Victoria’s Secret, PINK. Stores that sold primarily to young women and children. That shaped culture around tween clothing… Epstein was a driving force behind the obsession with prepubescence and the sexualization of young children. Before we knew the term “the male gaze” we knew what it felt to be viewed through that lens. We also knew that it wasn’t about our peers, our classmates. The male gaze was held by adult men who saw us as sexual objects from the moment we exited toddlerhood…”

As I have discussed in several previous essays, the concept of the “male gaze” is often misunderstood literally as “men who look.” In practice, it operates less as a series of personal acts but as the more abstract subconscious influence men in positions of power. This creator has the right instinct in her assessment when she reflects on her past, that it’s not her classmates or her peers, that perpetuate the so called “male gaze” so much as it is that industries governed overwhelmingly by men have shaped the visual and commercial languages through which femininity is constructed, circulated, and understood. These elite men on top are pulling the puppet strings of consumer culture…and we the women & girls are their dolls.

Women have been historically positioned within culture as not the creators of art, nor the target audience, but merely as incidental consumers. Women then come to internalize this representation of the female experience as dictated and represented by a narrow demographic of men. Media has allowed women to consume themselves only as vessels to be consumed. Culture—through media representations—has in this way trained women on how to best present themselves within the context of being consumed. But more specifically on how to be consumed by a very specific target demographic.

When discussing topics such as the male gaze as it pertains to advertisements and media it is important to question who art and media are made for. Who is the target demographic? Women may be passive consumers of media, but for much of the history of art and cultural production they were not the intended audience of the majority of it. The male gaze in reference to art and media, as defined by John Berger, has inherently pedophilic qualities in nature. Feminine performance, as shaped by dominant Western culture, is deeply intertwined with infantilization, positioning the girl as the ultimate feminine ideal rather than the adult woman. The pressure for women to be youthful, hairless, submissive, and docile reflects this convergence of the male gaze with the infantilizing characteristics inherent to it.

Because women are trained from birth to perform in ways meant to be consumed, all women raised within this media environment have inevitably been shaped by this gaze. By extension this gaze—and by extension the pedophilic lens inherent to it—also permeates our subconscious mind. Most women I know shave their legs, underarms, and genitals, while our male partners’ bodies remain largely untouched. Many of my friends—even academic feminists—speak openly about getting Botox and fillers to soften smile lines and emerging forehead wrinkles, and maintain extensive skincare routines.

Likewise, the beauty standard of slimness is rooted in a legacy shaped a legacy of pedophilic beauty standards dictated by elites within the fashion world. This connection is further emphasized by Les Wexner’s association with Epstein. In her memoir Nobody’s Girl, Virginia Giuffre writes that Epstein was highly controlling about diet and health, projecting these expectations onto his victims. She recalls Epstein expressing a preference for very slim bodies and attempting to control what herself and the other girls ate in order to maintain to their slender teenage—or sometimes prepubescent—frames.

In his essay Nymphet Fantasies: Child Beauty Pageants and the Politics of Innocence Henry Giroux writes

“In advertisements for Calvin Klein’s Obsession perfume and in his more recent jeans ads, innocence becomes a fractured sign and is used unapologetically to present children as the objects of desire and adults as voyeurs. Innocence in this instance feeds into enticing images of childlike purity as it simultaneously sexualizes and markets such images. Sexualizing children may be the final frontier in the fashion world, exemplified by the rise of models such as Kate Moss who represent the ideal woman as a waif—sticklike, expressionless, and blank-eyed.48 Or it simply makes celebrities out of teenage models such as Ivanka Trump, who in their waning teen years are left wondering if they are too old to have a career in those culture industries that reduce a woman’s talents to elusive and short-lived standards of desire, sexuality, and beauty. What connects the beauty pageants to the world of advertising and fashion modelling is that young girls are being taught to become little women, while women are being taught to assume the identities of powerless, childlike waifs.” (p60)

It is admittedly exhausting to try and exist ethically in the world as a woman when so much of the cultural infrastructure defining girlhood and womanhood has been shaped by people who seek to exploit us at best, or enslave, torture, and kill us at worst. The fashion and beauty industries are entangled with this exploitation. Theres a reason it seems as though every fashion label is owned by a sexual predator. These patterns are not incidental; they reflect the broader reality of consumer capitalism, and the way it is designed to reward corrupt behaviour. Consumer capitalism functions through extraction—of labor, of resources, and of bodies. This extractive nature shapes both environmental destruction and the treatment of women. Extreme concentrations of wealth are enabled by systems that prioritize profit over care, allowing abuses of power to flourish. The billionaire class is sacrificing the planet on a mass scale and this is intrinsically tied to systemic abuse of women. Aka… anyone morally bankrupt enough to be a billionaire is morally bankrupt enough to sacrifice women. It’s all interconnected. A culture with a disregard for the land has a disregard for women and vice versa.

Many Indigenous scholars, activists, and community members have long drawn connections between violence against the land and violence against women, arguing that cultures predicated on values of extraction and domination enact these values across every domain.

Melina Laboucan-Massimo states in VIOLENCE ON THE LAND, VIOLENCE ON OUR BODIES: Building an Indigenous Response to Environmental Violence:

“The industrial system of resource extraction in Canada is predicated on systems of power and domination. This system is based on the raping and pillaging of Mother Earth as well as violence against women. The two are inextricably linked. With the expansion of extractive industries, not only do we see desecration of the land, we see an increase in violence against women. ”

Within this framework, the world itself is treated as a resource to be mined for pleasure and capital, even if the land is destroyed in the long run. Women are subjected to this same logic of extraction—viewed not as people, but as an extractable resource to be used, exploited, and disposed of.

The First Degree stated in a podcast clip:

“Jeffrey Epstein was the owner of Too Incorporated. Too Incorporated is the Limited, Limited Too, Justice clothing. That ownership came from Les Wexner who owns everything. Including Victoria’s Secret. Les Wexner gave Jeffrey Epstein this corporation, but why?”

In the same way that little girls are taught early on to embody the characteristics of “femininity,” such as docility and caregiving, they are also trained—often subconsciously—on how to aesthetically present themselves within the context of being consumed. For instance, when we look at children’s clothing, despite the relative lack of sexual dimorphism in pre-pubescent bodies, clothing designed for girls is often smaller, tighter, and shorter than that designed for boys, restricting their ability to play and move freely in favor of performing the aesthetics of girlishness. Function is forgoed in favour of femininity. It is not a coincidence that many brands that design these clothes for girls are owned by predators.

Little girls are routinely sent home from school for wearing clothes that are too short, tight, or small. Pedophiles were permitted to own the entire industry of tween and teenage fashion and then committed psychological warfare on adolescent girls for dressing too “provocative” and “tempting” to adult men.

Henry Giroux continues;

“What I want to suggest is that the values and dominant motifs that shape beauty pageants gain their meaning and appeal precisely because they find expression in related cultural spheres throughout American society. For instance, by examining advertising campaigns such as those produced by Calvin Klein or in the increasing use of advertising that depicts the ideal modern American female as young, extremely thin, sexually alluring, and available, it becomes clear that the processes at work in the objectification of young children are not altogether different from the social relations that take place in other sites. All of these sites use the bodies and body parts of young girls to market desire and sell goods. What often makes such connections untenable in the public eye is that beauty pageants appropriate innocence as a trope for doing what is best for children, often in the name of dominant family values. And yet, it is precisely in the name of innocence that practices that might be seen in other contexts as abusive to children are defined within the dominant culture as simply good, clean, family entertainment.”

In my essay discussing Walter Benjamin’s theory of aura, I discussed how the mediums through which fashion is advertised shifts as the culture does, and the same can be said for modes of child exploitation. From the emergence of child beauty pageants, to child stars, to child influencers, culture continuously finds new ways to exploit and parasocially groom little girls.

In the 2000s, we saw the emergence of “countdown clocks” where predatory men would host “countdowns” on their websites or radio stations counting down when child stars such as Natalie Portman or the Olsen twins turns 18 and would therefore be “legal.” Today, a similar phenomena appears around young influencers. Figures like Bhad Bhabie and Piper Rockelle are now the ones hosting their own countdown clocks in order to launch their OnlyFans. This reflects the extent to which cultural systems have aided in successfully grooming young girls. In the same way that we can recognize how vulnerability and environment contribute to exploitation in individual cases, similar structural conditions shape contemporary forms of sexual exploitation of girls.

There is frequent discussion about the 1.4 million women on OnlyFans, yet far less attention is given to the hundreds of millions of men who pay for their services. Names like Piper Rockelle are public—and therefore subject not only to predators but also to intense online scrutiny for joining such platforms. Meanwhile the identities of the men eager to subscribe to a freshly 18 year old are not public. This is by design. Our culture is structured in a way that places women and girls under public surveillance and moral judgment for participating in a system they have been conditioned and groomed to find value in, while simultaneously protecting the identities of the men who generate the demand for the very product these women are criticized for supplying.

Henry Giroux writes;

“Educational theorist Valerie Walkerdine argued that forms of popular culture such as the beauty pageant offer a way for working-class girls to escape the limiting discourses and ideologies found in schools and other institutions. Popular culture becomes a realm of fantasy offering the promise of escape, possibility, and personal triumph. Desire in this instance gains expression through an endless parade of highly sexualized images and narratives that not only provide the promise of erotic fantasies that “belong to them” but also constitute for these young girls an important strategy for survival.47 According to Walkerdine, popular cultural forms such as child beauty pageants occupy a reputable public space in which preadolescent working-class girls are offered forms of identification they can appropriate as survival practices in a society stacked against them. But what Walkerdine ignores is that such fantasies often are founded on forms of identification and hope that offer nothing more than the swindle of fulfillment, providing limited choices and options to young girls.”

We can see how the child influencer economy deeply parallels this. And that in a similar way, child influencers—especially child influencers who grow up within systemic poverty are given the illusion of an avenue of escape through a mode that both exploits and grooms them. One clip of eighteen year old Piper Rockelle shows that through her OnlyFans she was able to retire her grandmother. She tells her grandma this as they both break down in tears, Piper explains that it’s hard for her to watch her grandmother have to work into her elderly years when she is in physical pain.

Virginia Roberts Giuffre likewise discusses how girls from impoverished backgrounds were intentionally preyed upon by Epstein and his scouts. I, too, saw pageantry and modelling as a potential way out of the poverty I grew up in. As I wrote in a previous essay:

“I became obsessed with beauty very prematurely. In many ways, I saw it as a way out. Perhaps I watched too many fairytales of the poor young maiden being rescued from unfortunate circumstances by a wealthy prince because she was beautiful. I thought maybe beauty would save me. If I won enough pageants or got signed by a major modelling agency, I could escape my life of poverty.”

When Virginia Roberts recalls her experience of being molested by her father and his friend in her childhood and teen years she details the way in which she always found comfort in watching Cinderella during these times, finding solace in the story of a girl mistreated by her family who ultimately escapes her circumstances when she is saved by a wealthy prince. The symbolism becomes especially unsettling later in her account, when she describes being woken by Ghislaine Maxwell in London and told that it was a “very special day”—that, “just like Cinderella,” she was going to meet a prince. Though in Virginia’s case, the Prince—Prince Andrew—would not save her. Instead he would only add to the sexual abuse she endured.

Prince Andrew, Virginia Roberts, and Ghislaine Maxwell

Henry Giroux writes;

“To provide a historical perspective on such pageants, Sixty Minutes aired cuts from child beauty pageants that had been seen on the program in 1977 and then presented videotaped shots of JonBenet and other children performing in a recent pageant. The contrast was both obscene and informative. The children in the 1977 pageants wore little-girl dresses and ribbons in their hair; they embodied a childlike innocence as they displayed their little-girl talents— singing, tap, and baton twirling. Not so with the more recent pageant shots. The contestants did not look like little girls but rather like coquettish young women whose talents were reduced to an ability to move suggestively across the stage.”

This quote from Giroux highlights the progressive deformation of feminine performance. The line between woman and girl becomes increasingly blurred over time as culture moves further into the simulacrum of feminine performance. The feminine spectacle mutates until it exposes the the ugly underbelly of the culture that produced it. The young-girl has always been a mirror reflecting back the desires of capital.

Child pageantry is not an outlier, but a symptom of a culture that emphasizes teaching girls the importance of feminine performance, exemplifying the collapse of distinctions between “girl” and “woman” within standards of feminine beauty. With toddlers on stage wearing makeup, heels, and corsets, and adult women wearing baby-doll dresses, ribbons, and Mary Jane shoes, we inhabit a culture in which girls and women alike are encouraged to embody the same idealized archetype: a mutated, artificially constructed, feminine figure defined by ambiguous youth paired with sexual viability.

In Visual and Other Pleasures Laura Mulvey writes;

“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.”

The industries of child pageantry, child stardom, and now child influencing groom girls within this framework. The young girl is molded with the awareness and expectation that she will be looked at, and is taught how to perform correctly under such voyeurism that is inherent to her existence as a girl. Whether it be to attract this gaze or deter it, little girls are raised with an increased awareness of their bodies and the attention they attract simply due to being born a girl.

The obsession with youth haunts women due to the social conditioning that a woman’s value is intrinsically tied to youth. Susan Sontag writes in The Double Standard of Ageing

“For women, only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl. The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man. The beauty of a boy resembles the beauty of a girl. In both sexes it is a fragile kind of beauty and flourishes naturally only in the early part of the life-cycle. Happily, men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks — heavier, rougher, more thickly built. A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy…. There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat. No wonder that no boy minds becoming a man, while even the passage from girlhood to early womanhood is experienced by many women as their downfall, for all women are trained to continue wanting to look like girls.”

Due to the singular standard of feminine beauty that Sontag identifies, the blurred boundary between the aesthetics of the girl and the woman produces an effect of infantilization in women, while simultaneously fostering a culture that grooms girls to perform femininity later in life. As noted earlier in reference to John Berger’s theory, the influence of the gaze conditions women and girls, through their consumption of media, to understand themselves primarily as objects to be viewed—as vessels for consumption.

I am not shocked by that the billionaire class and their associates have been unveiled to be deeply predatory men, engaging in sick and twisted acts from sex trafficking children, to potentially eating babies. What surprises me most is that people are shocked by these revelations. There is widespread disbelief that powerful men could engage in exploitation or abuse. Billionaires are quite literary parasitic entities. You can only be a billionaire at the expense of human welfare, we all know this. History repeatedly shows that unchecked power leads to moral corruption.

When people have the means to gratify every desire without constraint or accountability, the boundary between entitlement and exploitation erode. Over time, this can produce a pattern of escalation in which empathy is dulled and other people are treated less as individuals and more as instruments for personal satisfaction. The issue, then, is not simply individual morality but a broader cultural system that allows power, wealth, and anonymity to operate without meaningful limits.

I want everyone to cut this “satanist” bullshit out. These are Christian men. These are Jewish men. These are Muslim men. These are Hindu men. These are MEN. Many are too quick to declare that they are satanists, that they are worshipping the devil. And I am so sorry to have to tell you this but this is not the work of the devil, or a monster under the bed. It’s men. This is what men corrupted by greed do. This is the good old patriarchal Christian values that America was built upon. Cannibalism, sex trafficking, and sexual slavery. Indigenous and Black communities will be the first to tell you, and have BEEN telling you, that this is the legacy of America. Change starts at holding our own community accountable, and that means admitting to yourself that that men, regardless of faith, have the capacity to be evil.

What we are seeing in Epstein files is not a one off mistake. These men are only unique in their wealth, not their corruption, and their impulse to control and take advantage little girls. Men like what we see in the Epstein files exist in your neighbourhood, on your street, in your school, in your family, and sometimes in your homes.