I’m​ not on social media, in part because the level of my rage and anxiety about American politics doesn’t need to get any higher. But I do feel obliged to keep an eye on the polity: I read the papers, go occasionally to demonstrations and, each morning, as I walk the twenty blocks from my apartment to Columbia to teach my classes, listen to news podcasts. Which means I spent the first week of February listening to podcasts about Jeffrey Epstein.

You might think, given the subject, that the male hosts I think of as the podcast bros would have invited on a woman or two. After all, it was women – Julie K. Brown, Tina Brown, Vicky Ward, Tara Palmeri – who broke and pursued the story. Yet Alastair Campbell, Rory Stewart and the rest waded in and manfully explained Epstein to me. This was for a time absorbing, occasionally (despite its grim content) funny, but in the end enraging.

As the whole world knows, Epstein was a wizard at drawing in well-heeled, insecure men and serving up what they most wanted: posh holidays, ‘cool’ parties, tips on investments, trips on private planes, dinners with Nobel laureates, donations to their wives’ charities and introductions to girls supposedly eager to spend time with a nerdy guy three times their age. The podcast hosts were keen dissectors of that sordid mess, sometimes because it was their subject of study, and sometimes because they’d been on the fringe of that world themselves. Of course they had. Anyone in the upper reaches of American (or Anglo-American) philanthropy, arts, politics or university administration has had to spend time making nice with donors, trying to turn their harebrained ideas into something the cause or institution could use. That proximity prompted some on-air anxiety. If invited to one of Epstein’s parties, would I have said yes, Stewart wondered? Would I, Adam Tooze asked?

Plenty of men (and a few women) did, even after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution. It bears mention that these were all white men – because Epstein was a racist, or because non-white men steered clear of him, or both. From many contenders, Anthony Scaramucci on The Rest Is Politics: US chose the US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, as his ‘Father of the Year’, because Lutnick, after loudly proclaiming his disgust at Epstein’s behaviour in 2005 (having been shown the massage table in Epstein’s townhouse), chose to take his family to Paedophile Island in 2012. Asked about that choice by the Senate, Lutnick replied that he went with his four kids, wife and nannies (that’s ‘nannies’, plural), so clearly nothing untoward was going on. And at least, as Katty Kay pointed out, the Father of the Year got all the nannies off the island again, which might have not been straightforward, since Epstein had expressed an interest in one of them.

This is to turn horror into a joke, but at least Scaramucci and Kay (especially Kay) talked about the sexual abuse. Most podcast hosts avoided it, focusing on the cronyism and political corruption the files reveal, and in the UK on the misdeeds of Peter Mandelson. Only Anand Giridharadas, appearing on the Ezra Klein Show, appeared to have read Virginia Giuffre’s book. The men she was dispatched to have sex with, Giuffre wrote, might have been rich and powerful, but they were awkward, socially immature and hadn’t a clue how to talk or appeal to women. While this explains some of the weirdness of the Epstein files – how desperate some supposedly elite men were for attention, how resentful they were at being rich and powerful but still unable to get girls – it also shows up the limits of the framework of privilege and power in which so many commentators have placed them.

The scandal lays bare the entitlement felt and impunity enjoyed by the powerful and crass – an impunity so well captured by Trump’s advice to ‘grab them by the pussy’. But while it might be true that not all men can get their well-stroked dick serviced by a naked 15-year-old in a New York mansion, any sad bloke with a credit card in Huddersfield or Cleveland can open his laptop and have a live-porn broker thousands of miles away make a 12-year-old boy rape his sister for that viewer’s pleasure. As a friend of mine said, misogyny is like water: stop up one leak, and it will spill out somewhere else. If a man is inclined to sexual abuse, he probably won’t lack chances, whatever his class.

Let me be clear. I am saying ‘abuse’ here, that is coerced sex, sex that often leaves the woman or child damaged psychologically or physically, and not all the other sex to which women more or less consent. One hopes most women will have some good sex in life, and that they won’t have forced sex (though plenty will), but a great many will have transactional sex – sex in exchange for things they need. I wish we didn’t live in a world where women exchange sex for a bed when they stay too late at a party, or for something to feed their kids, or for a visa and dental work, or for stilettos and handbags, but we do, and as the global assault on women’s freedoms advances, women will have ever more sex of this kind. Some transactional sex is benign and even loving: this is the kind a young cousin of mine was offering when, plopping down exhaustedly on the couch after getting two cranky toddlers to bed, she said to her husband: ‘If you make me a big bowl of popcorn with lots of butter I’ll let you have sex with me tonight.’ I burst out laughing, my slightly scandalised parents did too, and the husband sloped off to the kitchen to find the popcorn.

This is not the sex, though, that a 17-year-old who thinks she’s been offered a job at a spa has with the men who await her, or that a 13-year-old has with the maths teacher who offers extra help. These transactions are coerced, whether directly or through a massive imbalance in age, capacity, resources and power, and they are illegal, the law stipulating that ‘she looked over sixteen’ is not a defence. They happen all the time, though, to boys as well as girls, which is the reason I ended my week with the podcast bros more than a little irritated. After Harvey Weinstein, #MeToo, the Catholic Church’s cover-up of paedophile priests, the grooming scandals in the UK and so much else, any man shocked by the Epstein story has been working overtime at shutting his eyes. Virtually every one of New York’s elite private schools – including the two where I sent my children – has been rocked by revelations about sexual abuse of students by teachers. A girl doesn’t have to fall into Epstein’s clutches to see sexual abuse up close, and if she gets through childhood without experiencing it, she will probably find out that some close friend or relation didn’t. Men could find this out too, if they listened to voices besides their own. If they did, they might hear a story like the following one.

In​ 1972 I was living in Japan, the daughter of Lutheran missionaries. Missionaries tend to be poor but privileged: they live with hand-me-down furniture on church mouse pay, but the mission sends their kids to whatever English-language school is around. In Tokyo, this meant the American School in Japan (ASIJ), which catered to wealthy expats, the representatives of Pan Am and Pepsi and Chase Manhattan who were fuelling Japan’s wildfire growth. The school was self-consciously progressive, with college-style lectures and lots of free time. In seventh grade, we all took its flagship course, ‘Japan: Lands and People’ (JLAP).

JLAP was designed by Jack Moyer, a craggy, outdoorsy guy who had a PhD in marine ecology, fluent Japanese, scientific papers to his name (he has a fish named after him) and a record of effective environmental work. Moyer had a lot of cachet – even well-heeled schools like ASIJ can’t usually attract teachers like him – and ASIJ let him do what he liked, including taking the whole JLAP class to Miyakejima, a volcanic island about a hundred miles south of Tokyo, where he owned a farmhouse. We had a blast that week, shivering to Moyer’s stories about the ghost that haunted Toga shrine, a few hundred yards down the road (he would put a spoon on the steps and dare anyone to retrieve it), and exploring the brilliantly coloured tidal pools. We were children experimenting with freedom, secure – we thought – under the wing of the teacher some of us, at twelve years old, were already calling ‘Jack’.

The following summer, Moyer invited a few of us – a mix of the cool kids and the smart kids, four boys and four girls – for a two-week course on the island. I babysat to help my parents afford it and remember the trip being marvellous: we weighed and recorded Jack’s research samples; we snorkelled and swam; we walked on the cliffs, only slightly aware of the danger. When my parents resigned from the mission and landed in Minnesota two years later, I missed this life – missed my friends, my wonderful school and the exciting world of marine biology my charismatic teacher had opened up. What I didn’t know until years later was that I was lucky to leave Japan at that moment, when I was in Jack’s orbit but not the focus of his libidinal eye.

One of the girls on that summer course (let’s call her Olivia) – the prettiest, the funniest, and like me a missionary kid in a rich kids’ school – didn’t have my luck. She signed up for the scuba diving course Jack ran, and the summer I left, went to Miyake to make her first ocean dive. In a picture taken just afterwards, shyly proud in her wetsuit, she looks tiny, like the child she was. That night, she woke to find Jack assaulting her. ‘His hands were all over me, under my nightclothes,’ she said later. Two years of abuse followed, until she dared to tell Moyer never to touch her again. She married young, to a fellow student and later minister.

He was a good husband, helping her tell the principal at ASIJ what had happened. The school promised to follow up, and the couple – now living in the US – felt relieved: they’d done the right thing; they’d protected the girls who would come after. In fact, the school did nothing: the story came out only years later (and after many other ignored reports). The internet enabled Moyer’s victims to find one another and to confront him. The record of those exchanges is long gone from the web, but I recall their tenor. ‘I was just really attracted to you,’ Moyer writes to one survivor. ‘I was thirteen,’ she furiously replies. Thirteen women scattered across the globe developed a strong bond; they confronted ASIJ again; they secured legal representation. Perhaps seeing retribution advancing, Moyer killed himself in 2004. ASIJ lawyered up, asking Ropes & Gray, a posh Boston law firm, to investigate.

I can’t recall exactly when Ropes & Gray phoned me. I couldn’t tell them much. I hadn’t been abused (I think), but when I called the only friend from those years with whom I’d kept in touch and said, ‘WTF? What did you know?’ she replied: ‘Sue, are you really surprised? Don’t you remember how Jack looked at Olivia?’ I didn’t, really – but I remembered, vividly, the aura Moyer created around him, the way we competed for his favour, and the fact that (and the weirdness of this only struck me now) he didn’t appear to have any friends of his own age. And when my siblings and I cleared my parents’ house I found in my yearbooks a scrawl from Moyer telling me he had things to show me the next time I came.

In 2015 Ropes & Gray found that Moyer was a serial paedophile who had abused at least 24 girls in his decades at ASIJ. A settlement and complex negotiations about restitution followed. This is the story I could tell on a podcast – although in telling it I might become incoherent with rage or start crying. Men don’t really need to hear this from me anyway; all they need to do is listen to the women around them. They live with women, after all; they have wives and daughters and co-workers and sisters and students – most of whom, I’ll bet, are two degrees of separation or fewer from a story like this one.

‘Shame has to change sides,’ Gisèle Pelicot said, sitting through the long public trial of the many men who cheerfully raped her drugged body. It would be good if courage changed sides too. This isn’t impossible: one of my male friends, discovering the sexual abuse (this time of young men) rife in his faculty, became a whistleblower, sticking to the facts through counter-accusations and gaslighting. I think, too, of many other male friends, who love their partners, raise their boys well and must want more for their daughters than that they learn, aged fourteen, how to give a rich old guy a great blow job.