The chicken hawk next door

by David Benjamin

“The only thing these emails prove is that President Trump did nothing wrong. If anything, his crime was loving too much. And possibly too young.”
—Ashley Padilla, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on “Saturday Night Live”

MADISON, Wis.—One of the thousand rules drummed at me by parents, grandparents, teachers and clerics was “Don’t talk to strange men,” especially if they were offering candy. One of my childhood disappointments was that I never got the chance to look up my nose at a lascivious drifter with a fistful of gumdrops and cut him dead with a glare of virtuous disdain.

I attribute this void in my worldliness to two possibilities. The likeliest is that the hamlet where I grew up had its share of “strange” men, but few who were unfamiliar or dangerous. I knew almost every adult male on sight, and often knew their names. My other explanation is that I just had no sex appeal, a condition that followed me all the way through high school.

However, kids weren’t ignorant of the menace of molestation. One of my uncles, in fact, attempted something lewd—which she has never elaborated—with my big sister Peg. Despite this incident, I’m hesitant to classify Uncle Wiggily (not his real name) as a “pedophile,” because Peg, whose bedroom was down the hall from our uncle’s room, was more a target of opportunity than a victim of serial predation. Uncle Wiggily was an aging bachelor in a town where almost all the women were either spoken for or creeped out by lonely, horny middle-aged men, a category for which my uncle might have been the poster boy.

I don’t condone Wiggily’s trespass against Peg, but I understand that it was a moment too discrete and ephemeral to qualify him as a pedophile—a term that denotes a pattern of habitual, irresistible and profoundly abusive perversion.

The word itself, “pedophile,” bothers me partly because its root syllable, “ped” suggests that it means “lover of feet,” just as “Francophile” means “lover of France” and a “bibliophile” is a book lover. In fact, according to Webster, the “ped” in words like “pedal” or “centipede” is derived from the Latin “pedis,” for “foot.” The root for “pedophile” is the Greek “paidos,” meaning “child.” But this subtlety isn’t my main objection to calling Jeffrey Epstein and his moll, Ghislaine Maxwell, pedophiles. It’s a term so clinical that it carries a whiff of euphemism. The media prefer it because it sounds neutral and “objective.” It makes molesting children sound almost respectable. As your oenophile is a connoisseur of fine wines, your pedophile is a gourmand indulging in little girls and boys.

Fellow inmates at the penitentiary have a better term for these guys: “chicken hawk.” Jeffrey Epstein was, literally, a hawk preying on chicks.

Perhaps most remarkable about the recent prominence of pedophilia is its unwelcome but manifest infiltration into Republican Party politics. There’s no evidence, of course, that House Speaker Mike Johnson and his GOP colleagues are interested in groping pubescent girls. But, although they profess to deplore the rape of children by old men, Republicans have been disturbingly reluctant to repudiate the friends of their Best Friend who do that sort of thing.

Mike Johnson claims, credibly, that he’s seen no evidence that his dear leader, Donald Trump, took part in any of the Epstein atrocities. But Johnson can’t help but be aware that Trump and Epstein were “closest friends” for years, partying lubriciously with dozens—hundreds—of young women. Johnson knows further that Trump, like Epstein, is a sexual predator, as determined in an $83.3 civil judgment. Plus, swelling with manly pride, he admits that he’s a pig:

“I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women. I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet … I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Of course, Trump is not the first self-styled presidential Lothario. His foremost forebears were Jack Kennedy and Bill Clinton. The disturbing, perhaps inevitable consequence of Clinton’s tawdry tryst with Monica was that it made presidential adultery acceptable. This blow to the dignity of the Oval Office resulted not so much because of Bill’s turpitude, but because Hillary, driven by ambitions of her own, responded with cowardly silence. Voters, acting on the good wife’s cue, rewarded Bill with a wink and a shrug.

The stage was set for Trump, who didn’t just “love beautiful women,” but buddied with a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

In remarks like this, Trump candidly allied himself—in the privileged pursuit of pussy—with a pathological chicken hawk. The two bros shared a timeless presumption, common to the high and mighty, that they could afford any girl they wanted. They were relict to an era when nine- or ten-year-old children were sold into sexual slavery to wealthy old men or recruited into the harem of the local pasha. There are still outposts in the world where Jeffrey Epstein’s trade in the flesh of children is neither a crime nor a sin, but business as usual.

Whether the preferred term is “pedophile,” “child molester,” “chicken hawk” or “sadist,” its intrusion in our vernacular indicates that more people—not just the wealthy perps and their enablers—know what’s up. The secret is out. We know who the chicken hawks are. We know who’s covering for them. We have to decide whether we’re with the chicken hawks, or against them. For most of us, This is a simple, moral choice. For some, it’s muddled by money, politics and power.

There’s no more stalwart defender of Donald Trump from the Epstein stigma than Speaker Mike Johnson. The irony here is mindbending, because Mike could have been the kid in the Captain Shreve High School Class of 1990 voted Least Likely to Grab a Pussy (or even recognize one). The devoutly religious son of a disabled Shreveport firefighter, Johnson is as mundane and irretrievably suburban as your (white, straight, monogamous) next-door neighbor in Mayberry.

Mike Johnson has battled fiercely against same-sex marriage, deeming the “homosexual lifestyle” unnatural and ungodly. However, by staunchly battling the release of the DOJ’s exhaustive files on Jeffrey Epstein, Johnson obliviously signaled that maybe humping Lolita isn’t all that naughty. Johnson has tiptoed into a realm where once only the rich and princely trod, where well-connected predators sneered at the bourgeois inhibitions of shmos like him. Chances are Mike doesn’t even know where he’s going. But, in his own small way, he’s doing for pedophiles what the Supreme Court did for gay rights in Obergefell v. Hodges. He has opened the door, perhaps just a crack, to the acceptance by society of chicken hawks as misunderstood outcasts seeking only the universal human right to love whom they want to love, in their own special way.

After all, America has come to accept so much under Donald Trump that was once virtually unspeakable. We stand at the brink of the Great Normalization. If the president’s friends, fellow autocrats and country club swells can compel a full-frontal “massage” from a ninth-grade girl or order up fellatio from a twelve-year-old altar boy at a private resort, why not the same for Joe Sixpack on the pingpong table in the rumpus room? Why not all the guys in the bowling league, whose wives haven’t put out, or gotten any younger, since the twentieth century?

For that matter, why should the underage girls of America have to shlep all the way to Palm Beach or the Virgin Islands to sell body and soul to “strange men,” when similar opportunities for affection, connections, career advancement and mad money could be gotten just down the block, from men they’ve known all their short lives, who sell insurance to mom and dad, who grow roses in their gardens, who give gumdrops to kids and run for Congress?