Shocked by Epstein’s birthday book? That culture was everywhere before feminism | Rebecca Solnit

Feminism exposed the ubiquity of child abuse, rape, sexual harassment and domestic violence - and helped fight that culture

I was there. I kept the receipts. I remember how normalized the sexual exploitation of teenage girls and even tweens by adult men was, how it showed up in movies, in the tales of rock stars and baby groupies", in counterculture and mainstream culture, how normalized rape, exploitation, grooming, objectification, commodification was.

The last Woody Allen movie I ever saw was Manhattan, in which he cast himself as more or less himself, a dweeb in his mid-40s, dating a high school student played by Mariel Hemingway. She was my age, 17, and I was only too familiar with creeps, and the movie creeped me out, even though it was only long afterward that I read that she said he was at the time pressuring her to get sexually involved with him in real life.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell's Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology