“The sexual revolution,” writes Maurice Isserman in America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, “was an insurgency rooted in the conviction that the erotic should be celebrated as an utterly normal part of life.” This conviction, though admirable in concept, has mostly failed in practice. A generation of entrepreneurial and “brilliant” men took the job of defining the “erotic” for everyone else, without consulting or including the intepretations of women, and then purveyed to the masses an eros that degraded women and girls while pitching it as “healthy.” And then a generation of high-minded consumers accepted that definition — together with their belief in their natural right to be titillated — without making any meaningful distinctions between preferences and kinks and crimes. (Well, except men having sex with men, which remained taboo for decades more; lesbian sex was appropriated by the pornographers.) “Everybody’s going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there’s not going to be anything to apologize about,” wrote Tom Wolfe in his era-defining book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Thus one man’s fetish for shaved pubes was another man’s rape factory and all was acceptable in the name of satisfying the healthy (and formerly tragically suppressed, in the brilliant men’s view) male drive. “What is pornography?,” the Penthouse founder Bob Guccione asked a reporter for Rolling Stone in his dying years. “Censorship is pornography. Repression is pornography.”

So pervasive was this blasé shrug about the sexual proclivities of men, especially men in the brilliant (but also rich and powerful) categories, that it was an attitudinal requirement for anyone who hoped to rise among them. This mind-set formed the primeval slime in which Epstein’s — and R. Kelly’s — compulsions were allowed to flourish. In the late 1970s, around the same time that Epstein stopped teaching math at Dalton and Roman Polanski raped 13-year-old Samantha Geimer at Jack Nicholson’s house, a young Anna Wintour worked for Penthouse founder Bob Guccione’s porn empire — “and then was as surreptitious as she could be about her former employer,” according to Wintour’s unofficial biographer, Jerry Oppenheimer.