From Beauty to Power: How Society Teaches Girls to Misread Danger
When the Epstein files came out this time, many young girls, models, artists, from Lithuania were mentioned. And suddenly, even the part of society that had barely reacted to the enormous abuse listed there years earlier now had opinions to share about these girls who were “selling their presence” for money.
What struck me most now was how quickly the weight fell, again, onto the women: onto their faces, their ages, their naivety, their choices, onto whether they “should have known better.”
I am Lithuanian myself. When I was very young, I worked as a model too, not very successfully, nor glamorously, but long enough to understand the vibes. For many young models from post-Soviet countries, raised in unstable families like mine, with limited economic futures and impossibly high standards for looks and behavior (but not for ambition), external validation was the norm. And the rules were clear. If you were a “good” model, you got access: private events, introductions to influential people, trust from those in power.
You are praised by your parents and teachers for being a good model. You are guided and managed by your agent. The system around you reinforces that you are on the “right” path. So safety is never the question, constant validation becomes the goal.
From a psychological perspective, conditional love mixed with emotional neglect at a young age teaches the brain to seek external validation at any cost. Dopamine for you comes not from joy or curiosity, but from approval. It’s hard to believe, but money, status, or access to influence activates the same neurological pathways as parental love once should have.
When you are a young woman it is easy to confuse self worth with performance based valuation. You are praised when you are beautiful, chosen, agreeable, successful. Love arrives when you perform. Exploitation manifests where self-worth was long starving and self worth is conditional. But when your value is measured by access to power, you can’t see predators as predators. You see them as gatekeepers.
New York.
Dubai.
Mar-a-Lago.
These places are symbols, not locations. They simply represent that “protected and powerful” new life (as many of these Lithuanian girls asked for in their emails to Epstein).
So when we now wonder why young women walked toward men who were dangerous, we must understand that many of them were not choosing risk; they were choosing someone who saw value in them and and offered a good social conversion.
At one point in my modeling career, I was also represented by one of the agencies mentioned in these files, owned by a woman. For many girls, this woman often made a bigger impact than their moms because she made it, she has power, she will “protect” them.
So how does it happen that older women, women who had already survived the industry, intended to recruit girls to serve men like him? Especially when Jeffrey Epstein was already publicly known, and widely discussed. His criminal footprint was not hidden. The internet was already full of it.
Why didn’t women protect women?
Why did female agents, assistants, recruiters, and other models look away, or worse, take advantage of it? There are many possible explanations, but one answer may lie in a belief many women still carry: that our resources, unlike men’s, are limited.
So when I am finally granted power by those in power, I feel important. I don’t question their decisions because, in my mind, they have already made one good choice: they chose me. They trusted me. They are speaking to me. They know my name. They will take me to the next level.
Many women learned long ago that aligning with power, even abusive power, is far safer than challenging it.
The Father Wound No One Wants to Name
Now when we talk about “daddy issues” we often do it in a funny way; I think it is used more often in Pornhub searches than in serious conversations. But unresolved hunger for male approval is not a joke, and not sexy at all, it is the pre-made crop for P. Diddys and Epsteins to easily harvest.
When girls grow up unsupported or emotionally disconnected from a father figure, they are quick to confuse authority with affection. For them, control feels like safety. Attention, any attention, even if it is abuse, feels like love.
And men like Jeffrey Epstein, like so many others protected by power of any kind, specialise in exactly this vulnerability. They exploit everything that comes with it: the need to be guided, the longing to be saved, the desperate desire to feel needed.
But a father’s absence doesn’t affect only girls; it affects boys raised by single mothers too. Quite often, mothers raising sons alone are so hurt or disappointed by the man who left that, so instead of seeking a healthy father model outside the home: in sports, at school, among friends or relatives, they begin to neglect men as a concept. In doing so, they unintentionally neglect who their sons are becoming, raising them to feel unwanted or unnecessary.
And when boys grow up feeling under-trusted, they may later try to prove their power and masculinity in the most primitive ways, simply because no one ever showed them what healthy masculinity looks like.
In my culture, but I see it a lot everywhere, boys are often raised not to become great men, but more to avoid becoming like a girl: don’t cry like a girl, you are weak like a girl, what kind of music is this, only girls listen to it. But not teaching them what to do confuses the brain because it doesn’t say what they should do or whom should they become.
The Anger Towards Men That Hurts Us All
I see it so often, and I’ve felt it myself: women, hurt by fathers who disappointed or abandoned them, become angry at all men. It makes sense. You might even tell yourself you’ll never marry, that male colleagues, neighbors, doctors even, cannot be trusted. And you’d think you are covered, unless you choose to have children. Because you know, there’s a 50% chance you will carry a little boy for nine months inside you, and then spend a lifetime raising a man.
Women and men are inseparable. You cannot reject half of humanity without hurting the other half, and ultimately, yourself.
Hating men might feel like control. But it’s not smart and it’s not sustainable. Moms who raise sons while carrying that anger, who teach them to be distrusted instead of seen and guided, raise confused men. Confused men then try to prove their masculinity in the weird, sometimes dangerous ways. And the cycle repeats.
Hating men doesn’t protect our daughters.
It doesn’t fix our wounds.
It doesn’t heal our pasts. Healing, my dear comes from guiding our sons with respect and clarity on how to be a man we trust.
Raising a Different Future with Fewer Epsteins
We all know that Epstein files will fade from headlines with the next scandal. The men involved will retain their names, their legacies (maybe not the ex-royal Andrew), their defenders. But the risks will stay unless we decide to look deeper than scandal and ask: how do we raise daughters who don’t confuse access to money with self-worth and attention with love? And how do we raise sons who would respect women?
If we want fewer Epsteins, we can’t leave it to law entirely, we have to parent in a way that breaks the connection between self-worth and self-proof.
Protecting our daughters does not start with warnings about men. It starts with teaching them to feel whole without anyones approval.
And as moms we should:
- separate our love from their performance. Girls need to hear: I love you even when you fail. I love you when no one is watching. I just always love you! This builds internal self-worth, and girls who feel this are less likely to chase validation through men who control access to money, status, or opportunity.
- We should stop praising appearance as currency. Girls quickly learn that beauty equals power. So instead complimenting their looks, compliment their creativity, authenticity and choices they make. A girl who knows she is more than her face is less likely to trade her body for belonging.
- We should actively seek to repair the father wound. If we need to name one element that makes a father figure positively effective, it is their emotional reliability. Fathers, or father figures, who show up without conditions, who respect boundaries, who don’t overreact, teach girls that male attention does not require submission. And if a father is absent, mothers shouldn’t focus on teaching them how untrustworthy men are, but instead try to involve other reliable men who might be father figures in a child’s life, it can be an uncle, teacher, coach, friend, not necessarily a person living together.
- We teach girls that being wanted is not the same as being respected. Being chosen is addictive. Being respected is grounding. One leads to performance; the other leads to self-worth. Children must learn the difference early, or the world will exploit the confusion later.
- And raising sons requires equal intention. Boys who are taught emotional literacy, who are allowed tenderness, fear, and vulnerability, are far less likely to seek power over others. Studies consistently show that men who respect women are raised on accountability and emotional regulation more than on freedom and power.
When we make jokes about girls who asked for branded clothes from Epstein and call all men freaks, we create distance between our sons and our daughters. In this case, we blame one person, when in truth it is once again society’s failure. Countless others whose names will never be exposed: drivers, cleaners, managers, partners, friends, even caregivers were involved in enabling these exploitations. Society would much rather believe that bad things happen somewhere far away, that it’s never our business, until it is. We can’t change society, I know that, but we can start by changing how we choose to be in it: half-blinded prosperity seekers, or responsible citizens who deeply care about every person around us.
