Women's Beauty Standards Are Shaped By Pedophilia

Imagine the ideal of feminine beauty as sold to us by mainstream culture: big eyes, full plump skin, a soft high-toned voice, no body hair, no wrinkles, small frame, small hips, a doll-like face. A body described as having “skin like a baby.”

Now consider what you have just described.

The emphasis on women being very thin, closer to the silhouette of a prepubescent girl than a developed adult woman, and the insistence on hairlessness (also a characteristic of a prepubescent girl) does not reflect the natural adult female body.

This 1970s fragrance ad makes me sick to my stomach

It mirrors the body of a child. Many women naturally carry more fat, are more curvaceous, and grow hair on their legs, underarms, and pubic areas. The beauty standard as handed to us demands that we spend enormous resources erasing the very markers of our biological adulthood.

To illustrate just how embedded this ideal has become: women around the world spend approximately $280 to $300 billion per year on beauty products alone. This is part of a broader beauty and wellness industry generating roughly $450 billion annually, with women accounting for over 62% of all cosmetic and skincare revenue. The global anti-aging market alone was valued at $52.44 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $80.61 billion by 2030.

Insecurity is manufactured and sold to women by the very same people who profit from it.

Cultural pressure to look feminine has co-opted youthfulness as a feminine trait. As feminist scholar Susan Sontag wrote in The Double Standard of Ageing:

“For women, only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl. The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man... There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat.”

This singular standard — be a girl forever — is the exact reason why the patriarchy profits off the never ending demand of woman shrinking ourselves to the likes of a child.

A history lesson on hairlessness being branded as feminine

When Europe popularized the idea that body hair was “barbaric” and hairlessness a marker of civilization, Gillette saw an opportunity. In 1915, they launched campaigns targeting women’s underarms — ads that linked hairlessness to “good dressing,” “good grooming,” cleanliness, and even whiteness. Gillette shifted its marketing to capitalize off of women’s shame with its invention of the women’s razor.

According to Hub Spot, by the 1960s, 98% of American women between the ages of 15 and 44 reported they removed some body hair.

Telling women to be hairless is not really about youthfulness or ‘femininity’. It is this weird obsession with prepubescence.

Patriarchy wants women infantilized: thin, hairless, and compliant. The standards demand rompers, Mary Janes, doll-like garments, childlike hairstyles, shaved pubic hair. Having large breasts and wide hips — the markers of adult womanhood — has been made socially and financially disadvantageous.

As Laura Mulvey defined the male gaze in Visual and Other Pleasures:

“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.”

The ideal woman produced by this gaze is not a woman at all. She is a performance of a child.

Epstein, Wexner, and the Fashion Industry

The men who shaped the industries defining feminine beauty were, in many cases, the same men building networks of child exploitation.

Why does this keep coming back to the same cluster of men?

The Limited, Limited Too, Justice, Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, Bath & Body Works — all of it traces back to one person: Les Wexner. And then there’s Peter Thomas Roth, Estée Lauder and its many subsidiaries, the models who graced runways and magazine covers, some of whom didn’t even live to see their twenties. Epstein’s fingerprints are on so much of it. How do we sit with the fact that the images we grew up idolizing, the brands we trusted, the women we wanted to look like — so much of it was filtered through the vision of someone deeply, grotesquely predatory? And that’s the real revelation: Jeffrey’s tastes weren’t just his own.

As I’ve said before, the cultural ideal for women has always quietly been girls. You can see it in something as small as the language we use — well-meaning people still stumble and say “underage women,” a phrase you will never hear applied to men. That slip tells you everything. We haven’t moved past it. Not even close.

The reckoning happening online right now is rattling people in a real way, and it deserves to be taken seriously.

Epstein used his access to the fashion and beauty world strategically. It wasn’t incidental — it was cover. His connections gave him the appearance of legitimacy, an aura of safety, a reason for young girls to trust him. And he kept a constant rotation of them, which meant he never had to reckon with any of them actually growing older.

The beauty standards he upheld weren’t invented by him — but he enforced them, and he wasn’t alone in holding them. I’ve watched people online asking themselves questions they’ve never thought to ask before: Do I actually like this, or did a predator teach me that I should? Why am I so ashamed of body hair, of wrinkles, of taking up space? Why do I feel like I’m supposed to be agreeable, quiet, small?

What we keep hearing about the Epstein files is not an anomaly in the system. What we learn about these men is that they are only distinguished by their hoarding of wealth. But their never-ending greed to control children and women isn’t unique.

The men we hear about in the Epstein files live among us. In our work, public spaces and in our neighbourhood.

Without Les Wexner, Epstein would never have reached the scale he did. Epstein wasn’t born into money or influence — he was a charming, slippery operator who knew how to make wealthy men feel catered to. He met Wexner in 1986, and by 1991, according to Al Jazeera, the retail billionaire had handed him full power of attorney — an almost unheard-of level of legal authority that allowed Epstein to sign checks, take on debt, hire and fire staff, and buy or sell property in Wexner’s name.

Wexner has maintained that Epstein manipulated him, that he was conned by a mastermind. But anyone who has actually read Epstein’s emails — the misspellings, the absent grammar — might find that characterization hard to swallow.

It would also be easier to believe if Wexner hadn’t spent decades building companies that treated women as products.

There’s been a lot of effort to frame Les Wexner as one of the acceptable billionaires — a philanthropist, a builder of institutions, an Ohio institution himself. He founded the Limited in 1963. He bought Victoria’s Secret in 1982 and rebuilt it as a male fantasy made flesh. In 1987 — one year after meeting Epstein — he launched Limited Too, a spin-off aimed specifically at teenage girls.

That timeline is not subtle.

From there came Bath & Body Works, and Victoria’s Secret Beauty — which essentially bottled and sold the scent of adolescence. Express and PINK followed, PINK being Victoria’s Secret’s dedicated teen line, which drew its own wave of criticism, including for its runway shows. Rightly so.

By 2001, Epstein had taken ownership of Limited Too — the brand built for tweens and teenagers. Under that banner came a practice called vanity sizing, where clothing was deliberately mislabeled. A girl who was a size 10 would reach for the size 10 on the rack and find it didn’t fit — she’d need the 14. The message it sent to a young girl’s body image was quiet and corrosive: you are larger than you should be. You need to be smaller. Paired with the culture of extreme thinness being pushed through Victoria’s Secret at the same time, it was a pincer movement against girls’ self-perception from multiple directions at once. Parents did push back — there were complaints, including about the push-up bras being sold for pre-teens — but the damage was being done across an entire industry, not just one product.

And then there was the alleged scouting. Because of his proximity to Wexner and Victoria’s Secret, Epstein reportedly posed as a scout for the brand — a way to draw young models into his orbit under the guise of a career opportunity.

Virginia Giuffre, in her memoir Nobody’s Girl, describes Epstein as highly controlling about the diet and bodies of the girls around him — pushing for very slim, teenage or even prepubescent frames, monitoring what they ate to maintain those bodies.

The teen modeling industry reflects the same logic. Gemma Ward was scouted at 14 — and, as her career shows, was treated worse as she aged. Kate Moss became a model at 14. Brooke Shields began modeling at 11 months old and appeared in a Calvin Klein jeans commercial at 15 that was described even at the time as deeply uncomfortable.

Mark Jacobs said in a 2005 New York magazine interview: “Youth to me is the most beautiful thing really. I’m by no means a pedophile, but there’s a purity to youth.”

To understand why these standards exist, we have to go to the root.

For much of documented history, women were not considered people. They were property — bought and sold, inherited and traded. Within that framework, what constitutes a “good specimen”? One with her most productive years ahead of her. One easy to control — mentally and physically. A child who is pleasing to look at, with no personal power. Consumable. Replaceable.

These beauty standards were never about aesthetics.

As women have progressively gained more rights and autonomy over time, the cultural has responded.

When a woman demands equality, respect, and to be seen as a full human being, some men simply turn elsewhere — to those who cannot yet demand anything. Frail, childlike bodies are not going to seem powerful. They are not supposed to. The “ideal woman” of contemporary culture is the woman who cannot challenge you because she has not yet developed the tools to do so.

The patriarchal bargain offered to women within this system is insidious: gain social approval by becoming a prize-winning item, for the moments it lasts. Women are rewarded — by male attention, by social capital, by professional favor — for performing girlishness. And because women were raised within this system, we internalize its logic and project it onto ourselves and each other. Mothers shame daughters. Women police other women’s aging. Generations are kept from building camaraderie by being set against each other — youth versus experience, softness versus wisdom.

This is not an accident either. As one observer notes: it is really useful, if you want to ensure that camaraderie doesn’t happen, to make women resent youth and girls fear getting older. If women cannot build solidarity across generations, the culture that exploits them remains unchallenged.

The amount of effort most women are required by patriarchy to put in, if they want to meet these beauty ideals: exhaustive dieting, expensive waxing and laser treatments, constant maintenance, the list is endless.

It's expensive, time-consuming, and opposed to what we look like naturally. It is exhausting to try to exist ethically in the world as a woman when so much of the cultural defining girlhood and womanhood has been shaped by people who seek to exploit us.

The Epstein files could be the catalyst for a mass awareness shift. Women, we need to build our own cultures, standards, our own definitions of beauty that are not predicated on erasing adulthood.

We must resist and live life according to what brings us joy. Being exactly who we are, not who the misogynist, infantilizing patriarchy wants us to be.