When will women achieve true equality?

A post about gender stereotyping, criminality, and sexual perversion is kind of an odd way to end the year, but news reports kept yammering on about the verdict in the Ghislaine Maxwell trial. There seems to be a general feeling that the only reason she was charged was because Jeffrey Epstein is dead -- and, despite historic examples of digging people up to draw and quarter them, you can't try a corpse. So what's the next best thing when you can't put a cadaver in the dock? Charge his girlfriend as a "better than nothing." As a feminist, this pisses me off. Is it strange that it annoys me that this disgusting evil person isn't getting the credit she's due?

Is perversion the last bastion of gender stereotyping? Is there some rule that says women can't be evil, sadistic perverts who are equally as bad as their male counterparts? Why must Maxwell still be described as being essentially powerless, a tool who Epstein used as an enabler, a person who was basically a mindless minion just doing Epstein's bidding? It is gender stereotyping at its worst to assume that in a relationship between two rich perverts that the woman was the weaker one.

It's also a weird cultural contradiction. After all, women have been portrayed as temptresses, the people who lure men into sinning, for millennia so why does the media keep framing it as Epstein using Maxwell to help with his decadent life style and not vice versa? Or even as it being a mutual recognition of shared kinkiness and a perverted interest in adolescent girls? What if instead of Maxwell enabling Epstein, Epstein was enabling Maxwell? Witness reports make it clear Maxwell sexually abused the teens she recruited long before the girls found themselves giving Epstein special massages.

In any case, regardless of which pervert was the dominant sleaze in the relationship, it would have been nice to see Maxwell treated as a free agent, someone in charge of her own destiny and doing exactly what she wanted, instead of being framed as a poor dumb woman who let a manipulative dude exploit her.