The New Medusas: Survivors & Endurance | by Esmée Streachailt
Essay | Companion Article to The New Athenas
To the Medusas and the People, It must have been grating to sit through that State of the Union, but thank you for being there, for forcing the country and the world to bear witness to your strength and dignity.
We are collectively being subjected to a campaign of deliberate emotional and moral abuse. It’s part of the mustard gas of lies and distractions that are also real threats. The goal is our moral, intellectual, and collective collapse into apathy and collaboration by default. Fascists want you to care about yourself just enough to preserve yourself just enough to serve them. Beyond that, not even about yourself.
The insights offered by @themamattorney quoted early in this long read are helpful to keep in mind. The author is an ex-CIA agent working human trafficking cases. A dose of perspective and cold distance is protective tonic. The files are truth made partial and weaponized to abuse us and re-traumatize the survivors, the New Medusas. Adam Zarnowski’s book is on its way to my house. We need more of this man.
Adam Zarnowski
Ok, to the post.
Once upon a time, Athena was not the favorite daughter of patriarchy. She was something older, something more earthly, snakes accompanying her in many of her archaic images (see Dashu, Women in Greek Mythography, 168-180). A snake lived in her temple according to Herodotus, and some of the oldest images, like the Pelasgian Athena, show snakes coming from her body (Dashu, 169). Athena suffered one of the most intense of patriarchal reversals, from the forgotten whatever her own power may have been to a daughter whose mother Zeus swallowed (his wife/older sister), and her birth converted Athena to being his alone. The womb-envy is that intense.
All manner of snake goddesses are common in matriarchal Europe. That they are connected to both Medusa and Athena does not mean that these two are connected in some older unknown story, but it does mean that when Medusa is punished by the attribution of snakes to her, some deep dark magic is being done to a goddess by the power of man’s storytelling.
In the survivors of the Global Epstein Cabal (by which I mean the powers of the whole world in which we live) I see Medusa, both the girl confronted with the full power of the patriarchy and the goddess faithful to animals, paragon of courage, running the wilds with Artemis.
I see the girl suddenly assaulted in Epstein’s office. The girl of the notebook whose three babies were taken from her. The girls kept sequestered on a ranch, an island, in an apartment by the threat of even more unimaginable violence. If you tell, we will send Perseus to kill you.
These women who were those girls will stare at Poseidon tonight (I write this on Feb 24, 2026), Brother of the Modern Zeus, Epstein’s bestie, as this illegitimate despot addresses a nation 70% of whose citizens loathe him. His own Athena, Pam Bondi, would not look at these women when they witnessed her recent “testimony” to the Senate. Pam knows what looking a Gorgon in the eyes does to you.
Like Medusa, these intrepid women have been marked and sent out to their isolation. Hundreds of reports of rape, torture, murder, forced abortion, child abduction, forced pregnancy, and ‘the system’ turned its back again and again.
Isolate. Blame. Silence. Consume.
Like Medusa, they are still here and they are loud. For decades these champions, these warriors, have endured every trick our patriarchal law, economy, and fraternity have to play against them. Beneath their calm, I am sure that the need for vindication seethes.
We are fine with that. That rage. The blood these men have taken from these women calls out for its debt to be paid. But still, after all these decades, these millennia, the world cannot fully awaken to what it allows, how it really works, what it celebrates. By "the world," I mean most men. They think that looking and committing to better will kill them.
These girls were coin in an economy, one that is not just a product of our long history, but that has quite literally designed our recent history. We’re living in the Epstein Class’s Simulation of a world.
This revelation of the men, of their chummy rapiness, of their influence over (it seems) every nation, every institution, most areas of knowledge, the media, the arts: it should genuinely shatter the world. The abyss should open and shake. Their lesser imitators, the Tates and their ilk, should be hiding from us.
Writing of the inhale many normies are taking as the facts of the files begin to cohere, the silence, Zarnowski describes the process as all the normies (mostly men it seems) discover and begin to digest this reality: the feminists took the red pill long ago. To us it is only nature working in Her way that the Manosphere and Women’s Withdrawal from men, 4B and real estate trends for single women, arise at the same time. In this Man’s World, where the UN calculates that 730,000,000+ women alive today have been sexually assaulted, we are all girl-Medusa.
The monster-Medusa is designed by man's myths to be uncanny, to confront us with an ontological shock — this is real, this the power of these gods, bow down or become her. As Zarnowski writes, “What people are experiencing right now is a phenomenon called ontological shock. This sort of shock is a profound, often extremely traumatic form of disorientation when one’s fundamental understanding of reality or how the universe works is shattered.” We need to help these people avoid just closing that off with denial.
I had that feeling when I read this at The Nerve News, something massive and vague clicked into place. We’ve made a million movies about that shock. I felt dizzy and lost for a few minutes, and then I remembered who I am. We talk of ‘structural power’ as if it's weather, patriarchy as if it’s geology, but they’re not. They’re deliberate, coordinated action. Maybe not all men, but always plenty of men, always enough men to traumatize nearly a billion women. I’ve called it ‘the background radiation of men’s violence,’ but that is also too natural a metaphor. It’s meant to get at the scale, but the passivity of the metaphor misses the mark. We live in a simulation of a culture made by these … people. They coded it. It’s their algorithm. Medusa looks disconcertingly inhuman to convince us of the Unman’s God’s power to harm us — to exile us from all society. Shame. Why were you in that temple, anyway?
These men collectively are a system, but individually are just mortal human males. They can be brought to account — or, you know, I mean if our cultures would like to ever be worth a shit. We lived, we evolved to live in cultures focused on meeting needs, creating as much enjoyment as did not interfere with meeting needs (which was quite a lot, axshully), that were centered around children and their mothers materially and spiritually (and sometimes politically), and that deliberately refused to become extractive and violent. Whatever the evo-psych bros around JE say, we did not evolve to be this. Patriarchy makes reversals of matrist/matriarchal deep time because Patriarchy Is A Reversal. We live in rape world because the men designing it are gleeful rapists.
In the cultures where we lived in nature as nature, in our natural state, we lived in matristic/matriarchal cultures. We thrived. We invented. We traded. We cared for needs. We made medicines and art. We built cities and temples. We sang and worshiped. We learned others' languages and symbols, tech and methods. We shared fundamental values across thousands of miles for rocking up on 100,000 years. We didn’t rape and we didn’t hoard and we didn’t dominate. And that was all by design, on purpose, and coded too.
Gimbutas – Eisler – Dashu – and now Daeva, whose Before War collects and solidifies our deep history and its contemporary evidence for all those stubborn hierarchists who keep tying themselves in non-Euclidean knots of illogic to avoid admitting the truth.
It’s just facts. We really do not have to rehearse this anymore. We didn’t thank some sky god for our food, we thanked our food for our food.
Which, means that we can curb and reprimand these criminal men and choose to organize for our healthier and more peaceful future. Problem is that our justice and carceral systems are not designed to do this work, for now. But our social and moral systems are. We’re just not applying them because of ‘due process’. But, like the ‘immigration courts’ and systems there is no possibility of due process because the bureaucracy needed for the process is woeful and woebegone. The powerful men who could fix this? Uninterested.
I beg you, where is the due process for the Epstein Class, for the victims of that complex ruling class trafficking ring? For the between 300,000 and 500,000 rape survivors in the US anually? Again, the women’s own testimony is not evidence, and the bureaucracy is woeful and woebegone.
When Britain's most powerful political fixer was caught on an oligarch's boat in Corfu, we called it Yachtgate and moved on. The Epstein files now reveal the full picture: a web of Russian money, paedophile kompromat and New Labour access that shaped a decade of British politics, writes Tamsin Shaw.
Corfu is where this Medusa guards Artemis (remember her?).
These women of Crete were sovereign, self-possessed, whole. Relaxed. Where is their justice? Trick question, they didn’t need any. Their culture didn’t even dream of grinding them into the deserts of New Mexico.
Trrrrrrappppped in a system designed-iterated-maintained to prevent justice for women. A simulation in which a motherless goddess makes good fairies of the furies whose work is to avenge blood-debt to The Mother.
Do you feel me?
We imagine that Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades and their various sons had complex inner lives. We imagine that the Abrahamic God has an interesting inner life (we must be that life after all), but I have news. They do not. They are not OK. How do we know? The systems their stories justified, and that we still inhabit the most recent layer of, were never designed to meet human needs but to exploit those needs to create surplus value (productivity) the owner-rentier-Epstein-Zeus can hoard.
I am not the only feminist to observe that patriarchy has worked over the millennia to reward, and therefore select for, violent and abusive men. From Hammurabi's Code to the Epstein Emails, we see regular practice of the destruction of women. We see the needs and imaginations of Dark Triad disordered men: the narcissism and victimization, the expert manipulation and dissimulation, the psychopathy and total lack of human connection. What is going on inside such a personality, such a mind? NOTHING. There is no inner life there. They consume and destroy the people around them because they have no inside, and their need can never be met. No other self can supply one’s need for selfhood. They design societies and cultures to fill the void, too.
The fashion photographer, the many ‘modeling’ agents, the teen fashion brands, the public intellectuals, the tech bros, the heads of governments/agencies/departments, the bankers and venture capitalists, the university presidents and board members – I mean right down the campaign against tenure and the Humanities writ large, the feminists in particular – the men who design the world are his men. They have done it right in front of us, barely concealed, splashed on the social pages, celebrated in long running TV series, smirking at us the whole time they trained us to celebrate their death world.
And that, my dear cousins, is what the DOJ is doing to all of us now with the files. It’s dumping the truth of the violence on us, the ontological revelation, as a cudgel to break us, too, to show us that Yeah, we can turn you into an uncanny and exiled monster too, and then we can send Perseus/Palantir to digitally erase your life. What should be an effective investigation on behalf of 1000s of survivors, the children born into this nightmare, and likely as many dead is Patriarchally Reversed into ongoing violent ‘transparency.’
Esmée Streachailt
ICYMI
Esmee Streachailt is the founder/editor of Medusa Rising.
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