Feminine Rage in the Epstein Era
Exposing the structures that empower the Epsteins of the world. A guest-post by Lauren Leonardi.
Hi friends, Joseph here.
I am honored to share my humble platform with my friend and colleague, Lauren Leonardi. Lauren is Managing Director at Ancestral Medicine—the organization through which I am certified as an Ancestral Lineage Healing Practitioner. Lauren recently wrote a powerful essay that was shared via the Ancestral Medicine newsletter, and it moved me deeply.
As a father of two daughters and a son, I have long been worried about the state of the world as it relates to my children’s future. However, I am especially horrified about the happenings right now in the U.S. (and other places)—where corruption is being undeniably exposed and witnessed across the spectrum of wealthy and powerful men. The Epstein Files are not the only exposure medium of this, but it’s the most prevalent right now.
Systemic corruption is a key feature (not an exception) of institutional structures built on extracted wealth and exploitative power. We can no longer turn away, ignore, justify, or pretend this isn’t real.
I hold the view that ancestral healing and lineage repair work is inextricably tied to cultural healing and repair. And I believe we are being called into a stern and necessary act of collective reckoning, healing, and repair right now.
Rather than weigh in on all of this myself, I feel it is important for men to spend more time sitting with closed mouths, open hearts, quiet minds, and attentive ears. The voices of women and the feminine need to be centered right now. Change must happen. Our old systems ARE breaking down, and if we wish to replace them with more beautiful ones that support, create, and enhance life, not extract from and destroy it, then the Feminine must be rewoven back into our ways of being. This is the only way we will heal the wounded Masculine that impacts us all (women, men, queer+).
I hope you are as moved by Lauren’s words as I was.
Feminine Rage in the Epstein Era
Hi, I’m Lauren. 👋🏽
I’m in your email today because I felt an urgent desire to give voice to the ancient power of female rage as fuel for world-building; and Joseph passed me the mic to share on his platform. Because yeah, this is a good moment to allow a woman to speak.
By the grace of a hard-earned, midlife commitment to my own wellbeing, I’ve mostly managed to stay steady despite the gruesome news cycle of the last few years. I’ve found ways to metabolize. To stay functioning. To keep loving.
Until the most recent revelations in the Epstein files, that is. You may now find me weeping daily, and in inappropriate circumstances, and it’s not because powerful men exploiting vulnerable people is surprising. It is distinctly unsurprising and structurally predictable. What concerns me most is not the story about one man, or even his network of cronies and enablers.
It's the architecture that makes it possible.
We live among models of power organized around domination, entitlement, and extraction. Models historically built and enforced by men at the center of empire, corporation, and state. We see in the files the same extractive logic of colonialism.
We can find the male gaze at the center of most every social heartache for millennia.
Man see. Man want. Man take.
World burns.
From Ferdinand (the king) and his number one pirate (C. Columbus) to record Wall Street profits that decimate housing stability. From the transatlantic slave trade to Gilded Age industrialists relying on child labor and environmental devastation. From today’s military industrial complex to the incomprehensible quantity of pedophiles in global leadership. These systems make the Epsteins possible. And the Epsteins are the ones building worlds we wouldn’t have chosen, into which we’re conscripted for life.
We can dissolve into the sweaty, salacious gossip of these files. Choke on the slow drip of new revelations. We can gaze passively as it drifts into caricature and fringe theory, till every lie feels true and every truth feels like groundless conspiracy. Till we’re stuck in the paralysis of our rage and impotence.
Or.
We can remember that the real conspiracy is not a secret cabal in a dark room. It’s an open, legalized system of wealth concentration that privatizes profit, socializes harm, and protects itself at all costs.
It works its way into our lives, our homes, our worldview. It’s in our values, our food, our sex lives, in how we consume, how we love, and how we yearn to be chosen. The conspiracy lives in our bodies and guides our decisions. The conspiracy has my mother starving herself into her eighty-third year of life to be one pants size smaller.
The conspiracy shapes what we believe success looks like, what we consider impressive. It shapes the kinds of bodies we admire and what we’ll do to ourselves to get them. It causes us to rank human value and choose comfort over kindness. The conspiracy views land as a resource and time as currency. It measures worth by proximity to power, which is why we climb corporate ladders as anxiety eats us alive and so many women end up in marriages with men they knew all along to be unsafe.
We are infected with the logic of the conspiracy, and no matter how anti-supremacy we think we are, there is always more. Always more that we can scrub from the crevices of our perception. And some of us need the scrubbing more than others. To the precious few not-queer, cis white men on our email list, I’m looking at you. We need this from you perhaps most of all.
The good news is, for every perception we change, for every little fire we walk through, we emerge more free.
And so, yeah, world-building. It cannot only mean electing different leaders or exposing different villains. Let’s do all that, for sure.
But our new worlds can’t come till we correct our vision first.
It’s like being a practitioner of some kind and claiming inclusivity in shared space without first breaking open your own attachment to the supremacies you recreate. It simply doesn’t work if the foundational inquiry hasn’t been done. Your “inclusive” space won’t be safe, and someone will get hurt. World-building is behavioral. In world-building, power, consent, desire, hierarchy, and belonging are actively negotiated rather than assumed. These inquiries interrupt the logic that underpins the systems of harm actively making our world feel like a living hellscape.
What does this look like in practical terms?
For starters, if systems are extractive, we focus even more being relational.
If systems isolate, our work is to connect.
Whoever we’re trained to view as a resource for utilization, we reconsider as kin.
If it’s our gaze that’s been weaponized in the perpetuation of these systems, or if we’ve adopted paradigms based on the overvaluation of the dominant gaze, our work is to become very effing aware of where our gaze may fall and how that might impact or shape culture.
It’s in the language we use. In whom we bless with the grace of our attention. It’s in what we tolerate and what we interrupt. It’s in what we praise or denounce. It’s in who we choose to believe, and how we hold space for harms we have unwittingly perpetuated.
It’s in how courageously we’re willing to love.
Here’s a wonderful thing: I still believe another world is possible. Not every day. But I see enough beauty in the actions of my loved ones, in the things they’re doing, and the things you’re doing and building, to know that there’s something to believe in. So thank you for being my beacon.
- Lauren
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