So the Epstein scandal is about politics? Silly me for thinking it’s about the mass abuse of women and girls | Marina Hyde

Obsessing over individual players and political chaos leaves less time to focus on the misogyny. And that’s for the best, isn’t it guys, says Guardian columnist Marina Hyde

Fair play to Bill Gates’s ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, a woman who fronted up to appear on a podcast this week while so many of the men who feature in the latest Epstein files drop found that their diaries had them scheduled to stay hiding under their rocks. Melinda was asked about Jeffrey Epstein, obviously, and executed a very graceful drive-by. “Whatever questions remain there of what I don’t – can’t – even begin to know all of it, those questions are for those people, and for even my ex-husband. They need to answer to those things, not me. And I am so happy to be away from all the muck that was there.” Oof. Yet she also said, more generally: “I think we’re having a reckoning as a society, right?”

Cards on the table, I don’t think we’re having one at all. Look at the headlines, or what’s dominating all the news bulletins. We’re talking about anything but the things that most need to be reckoned with. In the UK, we’re talking round the clock about Peter Mandelson, the one guy in this we at least know wasn’t making sexually abusive use of Epstein’s trafficked women and girls. Even if he did offer Epstein image rehab advice, which, as discussed here in depth on Tuesday, was a foray into the moral abyss. (Again.) But the frenzied and remorseless focus on political fallout – and not the male-on-female debasement that is the entire heart of this story, and always has been – is weird, isn’t it? I had a mirthless laugh at the New Statesman’s cover this week, which characterised the Mandelson affair as “the scandal of the century”. Guys, it’s not even the biggest scandal of the scandal.

Let me be clear. I think all the bits of the fallout we’re focusing on now are a mass displacement activity, driven subconsciously or consciously by men so we don’t have to reckon with the fact that we now have searchable records of the way some of the most powerful guys in the world, who have huge sway over our lives, talk and think about women. And about girls.

In some ways this is the dark switcheroo we should all have been prepared for. There really is no bad vibe/criminal abuse operation that a properly enterprising scumbag can’t just buy up and take ownership of, and then flip into the appearance of do-gooding. There is an incredible clip of Epstein being interviewed in some wood-panelled, gentleman’s club-style room, shot in either late 2018 or early 2019. “I made my living from old thinking,” Epstein reflects expansively in it. “But the future is for the way women think.” We pan out to see that the interviewer is his buddy Steve Bannon. “Is that a sop because of all the depravity you’ve done against young women?” asks Bannon. “Your new sop is that women’s thinking is the future?” “No,” smirks Epstein. “… I’m a firm believer and supporter of Time’s Up.” I wonder if he literally donated money to this #MeToo-era charity. I bet he did.

Anyway, all shapeshifters gotta shapeshift. A couple of years after Epstein’s death, Bannon repackaged this footage into a documentary called The Monsters (producer: Stephen K Bannon) and now calls Epstein “a globalist child molester”. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? But oh look – what do we have here? Also included in a recent file dump was some correspondence where Bannon spitballs a survival strategy for Epstein. “What about establishing THE major center for human trafficking, teenage prostitution etc etc etc – global problem, needs to be solved”.

You laugh – again, mirthlessly – but I firmly believe that only accelerating events, most pertinently the July 2019 arrest and incarceration of Epstein, deprived the world of The Jeffrey Epstein Underage Sex Trafficking Foundation. Sure, it sounds like an off-colour Saturday Night Live sketch idea that never makes it to air. But sex abusers creating fake philanthropy ventures that bring them closer to vulnerable victims? Let’s face it, we’ve seen it before, everywhere from the church to aid charities. And if these files show us anything, it’s that there would have been so, so many mega-rich male donors. So many fathers-of-daughters who are quite happy to to turn a blind eye to the use and abuse of other fathers’ daughters.

Maybe the foundation’s lavish fundraising brochure could have been shot by “arthouse” bondage photographer Andres Serrano. “I was prepared to vote against Trump for all the right reasons,” Serrano moans to Epstein in one 2016 email. “But I’m so disgusted by the outrage over ‘grab them by the pussy’ that I may give him my sympathy vote.” Elsewhere, Epstein reckons the way to deal with any Senate hearing into his activities would be to ape Trump’s successful supreme court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, whose confirmation hearings notably featured him denying allegations of sexual assault. “I guess I can mimic kavanaugh. ‘Yes senator I like pussy, pussy yes. Don’t you senator’”. Well, why not? For the benefit of the lawyers, I should clarify that those weren’t Kavanaugh’s words and he majored on how much he liked beer … But, his approach famously worked, and Justice Kavanaugh will have huge influence over American women’s lives for the rest of his. And even more famously, the pussy-grabber became president – twice.

So really: spare me the half-arsed elite pearl-clutching over Epstein’s crimes and look at what is actually happening. What has anyone in power, at all, done to attack the structures and attitudes that allowed them to happen? We’ve known about Epstein’s world for so long. As Julie K Brown, the brilliant Miami Herald journalist whose watershed 2018 investigation into Epstein was built on the back of years of her meticulous reporting, stated baldly: “Epstein got away with his crimes because nearly every element of society allowed him to get away with them.”

I agree. And years on from that investigation, we can see that the reaction to every file dump is born of the same look-the-wrong way impulse that allowed it all to happen. From Noam Chomsky to Steve Bannon, from Bill Gates to the former Prince Andrew – this is nothing to do with left or right, or new money or old. There will always be something more important than grappling the roots of misogyny – money, power, access, information, a political project, “how the world works”, whether you can use Mandelson to bring down Keir Starmer, “philanthropy”, realpolitik … . A million other priorities. The abused women and girls are nothing but a plot device, just like they always were. It’s the pussy-grabbers’ world – we just live in it. The only difference is you can now see it laid out in black and white.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist