Megyn’s Pedantry

During the Lewinsky-Clinton scandal twenty-five years ago, I remember parents’ bemoaning uncomfortable conversations with their children about sex acts that might have waited a few years if not for our President’s Oval Office activities. A semen-stained dress was in the news, and children will ask questions.

These days, although I don’t have school-age children or grandchildren, I imagine similar resentment about answering questions about Jeffrey Epstein. Sure, you have to warn kids about stranger danger, but should your ten-year-old need to learn about “massages,” procurement, and grooming? I say, no, they shouldn’t, but, once again, you have to answer kids’ questions.

Now, however, even adults are exhibiting a woeful lack of information. Conservative commentator (and attorney!) Megyn Kelly has attracted attention for her weird hairsplitting about the word pedophilia. She seems uncertain about the definition. To be fair, she insisted that Epstein’s behavior was “disgusting.” But she also served up this disquieting word salad:

[Epstein] was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. . . I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.

He liked girls who looked younger than they were but at the same time looked older? Fifteen-year-olds are “barely legal”?

Megyn went on to say, “I think there’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old, you know?”

Sure there are differences, Megyn, but what difference precisely are you referring to?

In fact, language can come to Megyn’s aid, if she really wants to split hairs. There are words for what she’s talking about. The Greek root paedo- means “child,” as in pediatrician and pedagogue (child-leader). The suffix -phile, of course, refers to “love,” as in bibliophile and philosophy (love of wisdom). Technically, pedophilia refers to attraction to prepubescent children, aged anywhere from infancy to thirteen or so. That’s why Megyn references a five-year-old.

Regarding Epstein’s preferences, Megyn’s talking (though she doesn’t know it) about ephebophilia. That’s an attraction to young pubescent individuals, around the ages fourteen to sixteen. Ephebo- refers to a youth, because in Ancient Greece, it usually referred to an older man’s interest in young men. If you want to get really technical, there’s also hebophilia, an interest in younger adolescents. As we’ve all heard by now, Epstein lost interest when the girls turned eighteen or so and passed them along to his rich friends. So he was, technically, an ephebophile or a hebophile.

Here’s the thing, though. Sex with anyone under the age of eighteen is illegal. And everyone knows that a fifty-year-old man raping (or “seducing”) a girl in her teens is not only illegal but wrong. In common usage, pedophilia refers to sexual attraction to children, that is, young people under the age of eighteen. Here’s how Wikipedia explains it.

Although ephebophilia is not a psychiatric diagnosis, the term pedophilia is commonly used by the general public and the media, at least in the English-speaking world, to refer to any sexual interest by significantly older adults in minors below the local age of consent or even people below the local age of majority, regardless of their level of physical and/or mental development.

In other words, we can call Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell pedophiles, without equivocation, to our thousands of listeners. We needn’t appear to question–because maybe people are using the wrong word!–the guilt of people who abused and damaged hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of victims.

Here’s another relevant Word of the Day: cavil, meaning to make petty or unnecessary objections. Megyn’s objections to the term pedophile seem petty, certainly unnecessary, and perhaps, more accurately, sinister.