BlackmailAsAnOrganisingPrinciple

TheArchDruid has an interesting discussion here :

Back in the heyday of Victorian sexual hypocrisy, women who wanted to engage in unfettered sexual activity faced a very awkward double standard. Men who had sex out of wedlock, as long as it was with women, suffered no social penalty; women who did so faced catastrophic social consequences, and often legal consequences as well. Among its many other difficulties, this left women vulnerable to blackmail, with their male partners the most likely perpetrators of that act.

I’m not at all sure who came up with the perfect solution to that problem, but sometime in the 19th century some bright person figured out that there was a way to even the scales: set up a sex club under the guise of a deviant religious cult. Men could shrug off accusations of sexual impropriety, but belonging to a bizarre cult was quite another matter, and suitable documentation dropped on the desk of a man’s employer would have consequences for him just as cataclysmic as the ones a woman faced if her extramarital activities came to light.

That was what drove the rise of one of the most distinctive institutions of the English-speaking world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the sex cult, a voluntary social organization that used socially unacceptable religious practice as a protective measure to facilitate casual sex. It offered men and women alike sexual freedom in an atmosphere of perfect love and perfect trust, backed up by the threat of mutually assured social destruction.

https://www.ecosophia.net/an-older-tradition/

I've been thinking about this a lot as the JeffreyEpstein papers are getting leaked. And comparing to JiangXueqin's argument that the elites pretty much need a blackmailer like Epstein to coordinate them.