How Language Prepares The Ground For Exploitation

Today, on a Facebook thread about patriarchy, a friend asked me a bitter question: “Are all women saints?”

I paused, readying myself for the magnitude of the response I had to write, about how it was not about individual men or women being ‘saints’, but about a system that depended on the support of its constituency, which was mostly (though not exclusively) adult men.

The word ‘patriarchy’ brings a swift defensive response from men who think of themselves as liberal. What they miss is that patriarchy is actually just a political ideology that has ruled the world for only a few thousand years out of the one-or-two lakh years that humanity has been in existence. One that has grown in its sweep and power as the age of capitalism spreads its tentacles into more and more of our lives.

It is in this context that terms like ‘underage women’, ‘sex with a child’, or referring to girls as ‘women’ in the Epstein files—rationalising the sexualisation of young children—have begun to hit a nerve. All of a sudden, as women come out from under a raincloud, the interest has shifted to the ones who are still weaker, more dependent, and less clear about their rights: children. The beauty industry is at pains to convince women that we are less useful, less desirable as we age and become wiser. And just as we begin to ask ourselves the all-important question of whether we even want to be ‘desirable’, the gaze shifts to the ones who are too young to think such heretical thoughts. A beautiful ‘woman’ is now, actually, a child. The standard of beauty now prioritises youth, thinness, hairlessness, obedience, and the wide-eyed look of the eternal babe in the woods.

What this means is that the market has allied itself with the predators who seek out innocence and call it ‘love’. And as more and more women are asking ourselves if we want traditional marriage, or wonder what benefits men actually bring to the table, and as birth rates all over the world begin to fall (bad news for an economic model built on endless growth), the guardians of the system shed their sheep’s clothing and start actively seeking out the children whose helplessness will restore their sense of power, and whose actual bodies might restore their lost youth. One is reminded of the ghoulish appetites of the Hungarian aristocrat Erzsebet Bathory who lived in the 16th century and tortured girls to death in a secret chamber in her castle in the belief that their blood would keep her young forever.

We have been deluding ourselves when we think that those days are gone. The ultra-rich have been lusting after extraordinary power and longevity, and even after our children, for a very long time.

One comforting thought is that while this rogue system has been in operation all around us, it has had to keep its worst impulses in the shadows, as the rest of us are shocked and disgusted at the idea of going after children, enough to bring down governments and corporations if we catch leaders and celebrities at it. Evidence of pedophilia is the ultimate ‘kompromat’, or leverage for blackmail. The system that rules our lives is vulnerable to the distaste felt by ordinary people who have stayed sane and not joined in the feeding frenzy.

This fascination with children is the flip side of a world where women have been consistently sidelined and diminished in favour of men, reduced to the role of junior partners. The ideal doctor in the United States is male, because doctors are supposed to earn top-dollar. Medical school fees in the US are kept prohibitively high to scare away women, even if less monied women might be better at caring for patients. Like African Americans, whose value was kept artificially low in all the years that they built the US economy, in the days of slavery when cotton was king, the rest of us outside the circle of power are slowly understanding that this is not a ‘law of nature’ that we are up against, but a very venal system that seems to be reaching a dead end. The only ones not politicised, yet, seem to be… children.

So, words are pressed into use to normalise a shift in our focus. It is inconvenient for the powerful that sex with a child below the age of consent is statutory rape. And we see a thread of discourse entering the public domain on how this legal safeguard could be undone, and children presented as fair game. Language is a well-known tool for shaping a new reality, and compliant media are happy to push the agenda. There is a sense of panic, as if it were not enough to simply spare the Epstein class consequences for its gruesome activities. They need the public to absolve them too. Is the system cracking?

That is a crazily reassuring thought, because mega systems do not give up this secret easily. It is devilishly hard to tell when things have got to the point where the Masters of the Universe are scrambling and looking for cover. They have always seemed so invulnerable. The mere fact that we are asking ourselves all these questions now means that ordinary people may be ready to move beyond just changing the lead actors—electoral democracy—to contemplate how deep the rot in the system really is, and how much we have to rethink and rework before we have anything like the equitable world we thought we were heading for. It is not only children who have been short-changed. Ordinary people are feeling the blow too. Inequality is at an all-time high. This is a moment when we are forced to stare into the abyss, and wonder how much of what we thought of as ‘progress’ was ever in our interest at all. It is a moment of clarity.

But still. Words like this released in a flood upon the general public are an attempt to distract us, make it ‘cognitively expensive’ for the public to process the situation. They overwhelm us, adding to the sense of people safe in their depravity, unreachable. “We will do what we will do, and there is nothing you can do about it.” They are weaponising the disclosure, with provocative black bars teasing us as they redact whatever they want to hide. Telling us the truth in a way that makes it… almost useless. It is the linguistic equivalent of a smirk.

Is that true, or are they actually in a death spiral, when the innards of the system are so visible that there is nothing for them to do but brazen it out? A giant beast is convulsing as it falls to the ground and goes extinct. There is an old truism that says that whether elephants fight or make love, it is the innocent ants that will be crushed. The little ones. The children.

And then… it will all be over. Will it?

Peggy Mohan is a professor of linguistics and the author of several books, including Wanderers, Kings, Merchants and Father Tongue, Motherland