Lessons from Wall Street sex trafficker Howard Rubin

I just listened to the Journal episode on Howard Rubin, the Wall Street trading legend who (allegedly?) tortured and raped multiple women in a Manhattan sex dungeon.

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The story reminded me of a woman I met in San Francisco.

Rubin was aided by a Ghislane Maxwell-type kind of Chief Operations Officer of Torture, Inc. named Jennifer Powers.

I thought back to a woman who ran sex parties in the house she shared with her very wealthy boyfriend. Something seemed a bit off about her. She gave me lowkey psychopath vibes. Then someone warned me not to go to her parties. I assumed they meant these parties’ safeguards were too lax. Most of the parties I attended started with a consent speech. Organizers would remove people who were too fucked up to consent from the party area. So on and so forth. Looking back, I wonder if they had been warning me against something far worse.

I’ll probably never know. But I do know this. Howard Rubin has a cadre of women supporting him. His wife, his daughter, and his daughter’s dance instructor all say he shouldn’t be behind bars.

This reminds me of another story from San Francisco.

The parties I went to, mostly, required vetting. It helped if someone in the scene vouched for you. Sometimes it was required. The best way to know whether someone was safe to bring to a sex party was to have sex with them yourself. Maybe this wasn’t everyone’s understanding. It certainly wasn’t written down anywhere, to my knowledge. But this was how at least some of us operated and it made sense to me.

I understand why people, women, who worked with rapists and taught their children dance don’t believe they’re rapists. Because I had sex with a rapist without knowing. Multiple times. We even dated, briefly.

Now, to be fair to me, I actually disliked him right away. It happened when I learned he wanted to be a cop. First of all, yuck. Second, what do you mean “want?” Most departments are absolutely desperate. What’s stopping you? I’m almost as turned off by the ineffectualness. Okay, no. But it is gross to me.

But, we volunteered together. He was a good leader. He frankly grew on me. He was persistent. And, honestly, he never said or did anything – past the whole cop thing – to make me suspicious. Actually, that’s not true. At his parties the women were very young, the men were quite a bit older, and there were often more women than men. All this was actually unusual among my parties. It wasn’t great, but also wasn’t necessarily terrible either. It’s a thing I noted.

When I heard he was a rapist, I was really surprised. I didn’t fully believe it. I really wanted to ignore the whole thing and let the players directly involved sort it out. But I couldn’t. He and I were in leadership. So I heard out the survivor. I asked around a little bit. I’ll never know what happened behind closed doors. But he had the opportunity to acknowledge what happened, take accountability, try to repair some of the damage, and let go of his responsibilities until he could show better behavior and he chose to move to a different city instead.

I knew his victim before she came forward. She was significantly younger than me. She made less money than I did. She was less steadily employed. She had worse physical and mental health. She was physically smaller than I am. I get the impression that her family was less supportive.

There are people who are peddling the lie that sexual abuse – Jeffrey Epstein, Howard Rubin, Harvey Weinstein – is about sexual liberalism run amok.

First of all, literally where? When women are still losing their jobs and custody of their kids for having the “wrong” kind of perfectly legal sex, we are not in a sex-positive world yet, sweaties. Far from it.

Sexual abuse is, first and foremost, abuse. And guess what abuse is about? Is it about adults being free to have fun with each other without shame, stigma, or criminalization? No, the fuck it is not. It’s about POWER.

Successful abusers know who to abuse. They know when to abuse. They find vulnerable people and make sure they’re not able to leave before they start abusing them.

Howard Rubin didn’t rape is assistant Jennifer Powers. He didn’t rape his kids’ dance instructor or his wife or daughter. He had Jennifer find women in desperate financial need and offered them $2,000 for a night and $5,000 for a great night (according to Rubin). She told them it would involve “light fetish work.” They’d establish a safe word. Then, when they were alone in a room Rubin would tie them up, gag them, and rape and torture them (allegedly?!).

When allegations against Harvey Weinstein became public, Lindsay Lohan defended him publicly. “He’s never harmed me or done anything to me,” Lohan said. “We’ve done several movies together. And so I think everyone needs to stop. I think it’s wrong. So stand up.”

At three years old, Lohan started as a Ford model. She appeared in more than 60 commercials between 1989 and 1995. By 1998, she’d starred in Disney’s The Parent Trap. I don’t know when Lohan and Weinstein first worked together. But I can state with a lot of confidence that she did not need him at the time and he knew that. Harvey Weinstein raped actresses on the cusp of making it. He raped women who knew he could be the difference between stardom and obscurity.

Rape is about sex, of course. Young women get raped a lot more often than old women. But it’s at least as much about power. Most child rapists aren’t pedophiles. Disabled women get raped much more often than able bodied women. It’s not that kids and disabled women are so much sexier. They’re so much easier to rape.

The idea that sexual licentiousness leads to rape never made a lick of sense. There’s the fact that more sexual liberal cultures and countries have lower rates of sexual violence than more repressive ones. There’s the fact that as US culture has become less sexually repressive our rates of sexual violence have decreased. There’s the fact that sexually liberal policies like early, medically accurate, comprehensive sex education are associated with fewer rapes (and fewer STIs and unintended pregnancies).

That would be damning enough for the sexual moralizers. But the reality is so much darker.

The idea that there is a right and wrong way to have sex, a morally correct way to fuck that is true in all places among all peoples, and that people who fuck differently are morally corrupt and should be shamed and even criminalized, actually makes sure more people get raped.

Moral policing of sexuality gives rapists more power.

Most rapists are men. Men already have physical and economic power over women and children. Sexual moralizing gives men even more power.

Sexual shame silences discussion of sex. It keeps potential victims ignorant of the danger they’re in. They don’t know what danger looks like. They don’t know what sex even is or what’s happening to them. It tells them that their naked bodies and genitals are shameful and so anything that happens to their naked bodies or genitals must be shameful. Which keeps them silent and thus protects their rapists.

Homophobia adds to this shame. So does masculinity. That’s why men are so much less likely than women to come forward about their rapes. Which, again, protects rapists.

Sexual repression gives abusers and the people who protect their abusers a way to discredit victims and punish them for coming forward. Instead of just talking about the rape, survivors have to defend themselves against accusations of their own sexual sins. Sexual moralizing puts premarital sex and promiscuity on the same moral plane as rape.

Sexual repression excuses abusive behavior. It teaches women and children that we are responsible for what grown men say and do. We are taught that what we wear, whether we smile, whether we “flirt” can “make” men think and act abusively toward us.

I could go on.

There is no amount of sexual moralizing or policing or shaming or criminalizing that will end rape because sexual moralizing enables rape. It facilitates it. It empowers rapists and disempowers victims. In every place. In every time. Among every group. That’s how it works. Rapists know this. Everyone else involved is a useful idiot. I know, because I used to be one.

I’m still one sometimes. I’m still naive. But I’m getting better. I wish everyone else would get better too.