Maybe it’s a product of the fact that I’m now 30, or perhaps, nearly a decade post-#MeToo and some 15 years after a great awokening that has never truly ended, I have found myself objectively and finally exhausted with pop culture’s attempt to punish millennials and rebrand every passing fad and fashion we once enjoyed as not just problematic, but sinful enough to demand our penance.
In light of the latest due-process-free dump of emails and documents from the late convicted kiddie rapist Jeffrey Epstein, the perished pervert’s associates have come under renewed scrutiny. Not unjustifiably, the limelight has specifically fallen on Les Wexner, one of the late billionaire’s biggest financial backers and, other than the dead Jean-Luc Brunel and the incarcerated Ghislaine Maxwell, the figure most likely to have knowingly enabled Epstein’s sex trafficking.
The furor over Wexner’s financial backing of Epstein is rational. But the brouhaha is now really more about his fashion empire, namely his past ownership of top shops of the early aughts, such as Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch. It is not enough to question whether Wexner knew Epstein was using his buddy’s personal properties and prosperity to commit crimes. Instead, as a part of the seemingly endless pop culture re-reckoning, the zeitgeist is now to pay penance for every trend and fashion for being problematic.
“Millennial women are realizing our entire idea of girlhood was crafted by pedophiles,” wrote Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) staffer Briana Rose Lee in a post liked 20,000 times about Wexner-owned brands. “On a large scale. All our stores. Every product we consumed. Our beauty standards. All of it. Through a pedophile gaze.”
Trashy Abercrombie advertisements of topless men and velour sweatsuits by Victoria’s Secret PINK can no longer be understood, in the new narrative, as crass capitalist appeals to hormonal teenagers, but rather a deliberate attempt to sexualize millennials as minors into fodder for a vast pedophile ring of Epstein, Maxwell, Brunel, and supposedly countless others who have somehow remained unnamed despite the former trio’s guilt being public knowledge for years.
Even school districts are now rushing to cancel picture day over the Epstein apoplexy. Because Epstein associate Leon Black’s former asset management fund — from which he resigned half a decade ago — purchased Shutterfly, which in turn is the parent company of school photo firm Lifetouch, parents who have been happy to publish a generation of children’s most intimate moments and likenesses on social media for all the world to see have decided that school picture day is a step too far. Nearly a dozen school districts in at least four states have halted their contracts with Lifetouch over panic that Black is somehow peddling children’s school pictures to his pedophile pals (again, two of whom are dead, one in jail, and the others still unnamed a full eight years after Epstein’s life-ending arrest).
In this narrative, millennial culture wasn’t simply flawed in our obsessive focus on ultra-skinny socialites. It wasn’t occasionally tacky, trashy, or perhaps a little more promiscuous than we would want in today’s era, when minors are filmed for public consumption from infancy thanks to the brainrot of social media. Instead, in the re-reckoning, everything problematic from Limited Too to school pictures was literally grooming us. We’re supposed to understand an entire generation of millennials as direct victims of a vast pedophile network.
THE BAD BUNNY HALFTIME SHOW WASN’T FOR YOU OR ME
Maybe I’m now old, out-of-touch, or simply over a decade of being told I have to reinterpret every cultural trend as not just problematic, but potentially criminal, but I refuse to reframe myself or anyone else as a victim for buying a Victoria’s Secret bikini in high school. Maybe this is how my grandparents of the greatest generation felt when I harangued them about smoking in the 60s or what the boomers meant when they insisted the Clinton-era culture was simply a different time: kids these days simply don’t understand that back in our day — 15 years ago — we didn’t just dress for the opposite sex; we actually interacted with them in person instead of living our adolescence from behind screens.
Epstein had real, criminal associates, at least two of whom we know definitively, and he had real, minor victims whose cases deserve to be investigated fully by criminal law enforcement. But if your only association with Epstein was buying a pair of underwear, you were not one of them.
