This week, for the first time since 1647, a member of the royal family was arrested in the United Kingdom, not over allegations of sexual wrongdoing but for trade-related communications with the supplier of those victims, Jeffrey Epstein, to whom he is supposed to have leaked state secrets. The public outrage in the US about Epstein forced the government to release the files, including emails between Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Epstein now under investigation in the criminal case.

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Without feminism, the sequence of events that led to Mountbatten-Windsor's arrest would never have happened. It's a reminder that feminism is powerful and important and even transformative, which is why there's so much pushback from those who benefit from the old inequalities and the old silences, which are pretty much the same thing.

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Do women deserve rights and a voice in society? That's the conflict between the two systems that shape our society; in one of them we are, and in the other we're not, and if the Trump administration and its allies has its way, the former will prevail. (Various members of the far right, including former Mar-a-Lago guest Nick Fuentes, and pastors in a video reposted by secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, even assert that women should not have the right to vote, along with losing reproductive rights and other forms of equality and agency.) One way to describe Epstein's vast network of rape and trafficking adjacent to the exploitative modeling and beauty-contest industries that he and Trump also dabbled in was as a system of treating women and girls as trophies, commodities, objects to be exchanged on the (somewhat) open market, rewards, bribes, service-providers, domestic livestock, anything but fellow human beings endowed with inalienable rights. According to Epstein's victim Virginia Giuffre in her posthumous memoir, he "liked to tell friends that women were merely 'a life-support system for a vagina'."

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The Epstein files have exposed the workings of a mostly male elite concerned with self-advancement and unconcerned with human rights as they continued to pursue associations with a convicted sex offender. That many of the men at the center of this crime ring were financial industry titans makes only too much sense, because capitalism taken to its logical end transforms everyone and everything into a dead commodity and demolishes any rights that interfere with profiteering, be they the rights of workers, poor people impacted by the slow violence of environmental destruction, women, children or nature. The definition of trafficking is dealing in illegal goods, and sex trafficking turns human beings into goods. Feminism could be described as a long campaign to reclaim rights, freedoms, and dignity lost under patriarchy. This week it had an impact. The work continues.